It's interesting about the leukemia one. They're also more likely to survive it than children without Down Syndrome and less likely to get a second cancer.

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/11/408906/survivors-childhood...

Aside from that, it is actually hard to paint an accurate picture of today with historical data for people with Down Syndrome as the childhood Trisomy 21 strategies have improved and been implemented in the past 20-30 years. 60 years ago kids with Trisomy 21 were moved into institutions. Kids 30 years ago got some basic treatments to keep them alive. Now kids get all kinds of screenings for hearing, vision, thyroid, heart conditions before problems develop. Turns out it's very difficult to grow, learn and thrive when your thyroid doesn't work, or your cardiovascular system wasn't circulating enough oxygen.

There are more struggles for sure, including intellectual disabilities, but many more kids are doing significantly better than their past generations. It costs more, is more work, but like the parent poster said, my experience certainly isn't extreme. We go to more doctor's appointments, have IEP meetings, and she's in speech therapy. She's generally been pretty healthy, happy and very active.

It was scary when she was born. We were given a pamphlet with a list of things similar to your first link. The reality though is she's more likely to have those than the general population, but some of those things are very rare. 100x very rare is still rare. Having all of those issues would be even more rare. The greater point though is that any kid can have those issues too.

The epilepsy link seems to conflict with what I've seen. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31391451/ https://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/about-downs-syndrome/healt...

Both of those put it closer to 10% sometime in their life, with about half of those at birth.