Sina Technology Author: leaf
Beijing time May 2nd news, according to foreign media reports, every expectant mother wants to know himself The baby in the stomach is a man and a woman. Today, pregnant women only need a simple finger blood test at two months of pregnancy, so that they can easily know the sex of the future baby.
in the past, expectant mothers had to wait until the middle of the pregnancy to get the baby's sex by ultrasound. But in recent years, more and more pregnant women can learn this news in the early stage of pregnancy. This is due to a new type of blood test technology. In addition to the identification of fetal sex, Down's syndrome can also be detected.
this noninvasive prenatal test (NIPT) can be used to analyze DNA fragments infiltrating into maternal blood. When doing this test, it is usually necessary to extract about 20 milliliters of blood from the pregnant arm with needles.
and the Gustavo Bala (Gustavo Barra) of the Sabin Laboratory of Brazil medical diagnostics (Sabin Laboratory) now further simplifies the inspection process. His research team has proved that only extracting a drop of blood from the fingertips of pregnant women is enough to determine the sex of the fetus.
researchers conducted a study of 100 pregnant women and found that fingertip blood sampling could predict fetal sex at one hundred percent accuracy after 8 weeks of gestation. And the process is very simple: first, use the diluted disinfectant to wipe the fingertips of pregnant women, remove the outside DNA that may pollute the sample, and then pierce the fingertips and extract a drop of blood. Next, blood samples will be sent to scan for DNA from the Y chromosome. Because only men carry the Y chromosome, if such DNA appears in the mother's blood, the fetus must be male; if the Y chromosome is not detected, the fetus must be a female.
Barak pointed out that the advantage of the finger tip blood test is that the process is convenient and quick, and is more friendly to the pregnant women who are afraid of injections. He believes that expectant mothers will soon be able to use this technology.
but Andrew Mcrenan (Andrew McLennan) of the Royal North bank hospital in Sydney, Australia, believes that the technology can identify the sex of the fetus in the early pregnancy, which may cause more people to be aborted because of the undesirable sex of the fetus. This phenomenon exists in many countries, such as Canada, India and China. They usually choose to abort during the second trimester. It would be more common to know the sex at the early stage of fetal development.
Mike Renan pointed out that identification of fetal sex generally does not have medical significance, just to satisfy the curiosity of prospective parents. Unless the fetus may have serious sexual genetic disease. For example, if a mother carries the gene of Duxing's muscular dystrophy, the boy who will give birth will suffer from the disease, and the girl will not.
in addition, Barra is currently studying whether the finger tip blood test can be used for identification of Down's syndrome in early pregnancy.