New study on the relationship between oral clefts and fetal loss.

The sibships of 741 non-syndromic individuals with cleft lip with or without cleft palate (CL +/- P), those of 115 subjects with isolated cleft palate (CP), plus 2 series of controls of the same size were studied in a variety of ways. The 2 most significant findings were a) a higher fetal loss in the sibships of probands of the most frequently affected sex (CL +/- P: male; CP: female) and b) increased fetal mortality in the sibships with sporadic cases of CL +/- P when compared to that found in sibships with more than one affected. In general the results do not support the hypothesis of a causal relationship between fetal death and non-syndromic CL +/- P or CP.