Pregnant women worried about their babies’ genetic health face a tough decision: get prenatal gene testing and risk miscarriage, or skip the tests and miss the chance to learn of genetic defects before birth.
But a new prenatal test could make this dilemma obsolete. The new method, developed by scientists at Stanford University, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, requires only a maternal blood sample to spot chromosomal disorders such as Down syndrome.
The new method scans for fetal aneuploidy, an abnormality in the number of fetal chromosomes. Humans typically inherit 46 chromosomes, half from each parent. Errors in chromosome number cause serious problems in physical and mental development. Down syndrome, for example, arises from an extra copy of chromosome 21.
The new technique, which takes advantage of fragments of fetal DNA in the woman’s blood.
Because fetal DNA shows up in maternal blood quite early in pregnancy, the team says their technique could provide a much earlier diagnosis for fetal aneuploidy than is now available.
Source: ScienceDaily, 7 October 2008
Chapter: Pregnancy :: 10 November 2008
