News reports say it could ’save lives of hundreds of unborn babies’

From the [UK] Guardian, [UK] Daily Mail:

The UK’s National Health Service is spending £2 million (about $3.3 million) on research to develop a noninvasive prenatal test for Down syndrome and other conditions.

News reports said the test could potentially “save the lives of hundreds of unborn babies” by ending the use of amniocentesis, an invasive procedure which causes an estimated one in 100 women to miscarry.

An excerpt:

Professor Lyn Chitty, an expert in foetal medicine at the Institute of Child Health and University College Hospital in London, is the doctor leading the NHS-funded Reliable Accurate Prenatal non-Invasive Diagnosis (RAPID) study into the viability of NIPD (non-invasive prenatal diagnosis). She said: “NIPD is exciting because it could mean that in future many thousands of women will not have to undergo invasive tests, which carry a risk of miscarriage, to diagnose genetic and chromosomal conditions in developing babies.This test could remove the agonising which couples experience over whether or not to have an invasive test.”

It could also save lives. About 25,000 women a year in Britain have an invasive test for Down’s syndrome and another 1,500 for single gene disorders, which affect one in 300 births and are a significant cause of both learning and physical disabilities.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 7:36 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, abortion, genetics, international, prenatal diagnosis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.