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Are you pregnant and worried about the risks of amniocentesis and other available tests for chromosomal disorders such as Down syndrome? There is a good news for you! The safer test may be on the horizon! This new technique, as described in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, takes advantage of fetal DNA in pregnant woman’s blood. The technique that is developed by Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital scans for fetal aneuploidy, an abnormality in the number of fetal chromosomes.
Down syndrome is a type of aneuploidy that arises from extra copy of chromosome 21. Based on that, the researchers used samples from 12 women with aneuploid pregnancies and 6 with normal pregnancies. They found that women from the first group had more chromosome 21 fragments in their blood than the women with normal pregnancies. This test has the potential to detect other forms of aneuploidy too and could lead to earlier diagnosis of fetal aneuploidy because the fetal DNA shows up in maternal blood early in pregnancy.
**SOURCE: Stanford University, news release, Oct. 6, 2008 **