8 Things Everyone Should Know About People With Williams Syndrome

Williams Syndrome is a genetic condition that affects approximately between 1 in 5, 000 to 1 in 10, 000 people in the world – and while it’s a genetic disorder that you might never have heard of before, one in every ten thousand people is far more common than you might think.

If you suspect Williams Syndrome, genetic testing is the only way to establish whether or not the syndrome is present, and this is important because it gives doctors a starting point from which they can treat the syndrome and make it easier to manage.

It can commonly affect the heart, circulation and brain, and the symptoms associated with these effects can make Williams Syndrome a hard condition to live with and learn to manage – and sometimes even harder to properly diagnose.

Here are 8 essential things that you should know about people who have been diagnosed with Williams Syndrome.

1. It’s a Genetic Condition

Williams Syndrome is largely a genetic condition that occurs in about 1 in every 10, 000 to 1 in every 5, 000 people; the first thing you might ask is why the variation between the number is so huge, and this is mostly because it’s a hard-to-diagnose condition about which there’s still very little information available out there – and the prevalence of the disease will change as more information becomes available to researchers.

What you should know about Williams Syndrome is the fact that it’s a genetic disorder that you have about a 50% chance of passing the disorder on to the next generation – although sometimes the disease can also occur spontaneously without any genetic factors.

In both cases, the disease is present by birth already and happens due to the deletion of genes around the elastin gene and the elastin gene itself, causing most of the syndrome’s effects and symptoms.