Every year roughly 4 million pregnancies go through the same battery of prenatal health checks: analyses of the mother’s blood and urine, of the mother’s blood pressure, of the mother’s weight, of the mother’s blood sugar — even of the mother’s genetic makeup if she’s deemed a risk for certain inheritable disorders.
But if parents could know more about their child’s health before birth, wouldn’t they want to? And if a bounty of health information — even the unborn child’s entire genome and all the data contained therein — could be accessed via nothing more than a simple blood draw from the mother, wouldn’t parents want to have that option? A new generation of non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT) is prepared to provide it.
Read the full, original story here: The next big thing in pregnancy: Sequencing your baby’s genome
