Rare diseases · Sign or symptom
Poor suck
Poor sucking
HP:0002033
What it means
An inadequate sucking reflex, resulting in the difficult of newborns to be breast-fed.
Rare diseases that can present with this53
Very common80–99%
9- Alobar holoprosencephaly
- Congenital myasthenic syndrome
- Infantile-onset X-linked spinal muscular atrophy
- Kagami-Ogata syndrome
- Midline interhemispheric variant of holoprosencephaly
- Prader-Willi syndrome due to translocation
- Presynaptic congenital myasthenic syndrome
- Schaaf-Yang syndrome
- Semilobar holoprosencephaly
Common30–79%
23- 6q16microdeletion syndrome
- Angelman syndrome due to maternal 15q11q13 deletion
- Cleft lip/palate
- Cleft velum
- Crigler-Najjar syndrome
- DOORS syndrome
- Early infantile developmental and epileptic encephalopathy
- Glycine encephalopathy
- Kagami-Ogata syndrome due to maternal 14q32.2 hypermethylation
- Lobar holoprosencephaly
- Macrocephaly-intellectual disability-left ventricular non compaction syndrome
- MECP2-related severe neonatal encephalopathy
- Mitochondrial trifunctional protein deficiency
- Occipital horn syndrome
- Ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency
- Palmoplantar keratoderma-esophageal carcinoma syndrome
- Pontocerebellar hypoplasia type 2
- Prader-Willi syndrome
- Proximal spinal muscular atrophy
- Severe Canavan disease
- Synaptic congenital myasthenic syndrome
- X-linked centronuclear myopathy
- X-linked intellectual disability, Schimke type
Sometimes5–29%
21- Angelman syndrome
- Angelman syndrome due to a point mutation
- Angelman syndrome due to paternal uniparental disomy of chromosome 15
- Congenital total pulmonary venous return anomaly
- Costello syndrome
- Dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase deficiency
- DYRK1A-related intellectual disability syndrome due to 21q22.13q22.2 microdeletion
- Fetal Gaucher disease
and 13 more in this range
The range is how often this sign appears among people diagnosed with each disease — it is not a probability of having any of them. Many of these signs also occur in common, non-rare conditions. A sign on this page is a conversation to have with a clinician, not a conclusion.
Part of the broader category
Also called: Sucking weakness
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Start free with EleplanThis page uses the Human Phenotype Ontology (2026-06-23) — Human Phenotype Ontology Consortium, hpo.jax.org. Disease associations from Orphanet (INSERM), CC BY 4.0. Content is educational and is not medical advice.