Rett Syndrome Awareness

Forty years ago, when my cousin was an infant, no one could tell her parents why she couldn’t sit up by herself at age 6 months. (They were told the child had cerebral palsy.) As my cousin grew older, she began screaming instead of talking, hitting her hands together, and had difficulty moving her body. Rett syndrome was a relatively unknown disorder until the mid-1980s, and it was then that my cousin finally was correctly diagnosed. This was my first encounter with this neurological disorder which occurs mainly in females.

October is Rett Syndrome Awareness Month. Learn more about this disorder and the research that’s being done to understand it.