Can You Know the Sex of Your Baby From a Blood Test
Blood Test Predicts Babe'due south Sexual activity at 7 Weeks
Some prenatal gender tests that use mom'due south blood are very accurate at determining babe's sex, a new written report finds. But curious parents-to-be should exist wary of online marketers that claim to exist able to figure out fetal gender using simply a woman's urine.
New enquiry to be published Aug. 10 in the Periodical of the American Medical Association finds that later seven weeks into a pregnancy, tests that analyze mom's claret for fetal Dna can correctly identify a male fetus 95.4 percentage of the time and a female fetus 98.vi percent of the time on boilerplate. In comparison, tests that analyzed Dna from urine instead of claret were only accurate 41 percent of the time, said written report researcher Diana Bianchi, a reproductive geneticist at Tufts University School of Medicine.
"Information technology was worse than flipping a money," Bianchi told LiveScience.
Why babe'south sex matters
Ultrasound imaging can sometimes reveal the sex of a baby every bit early on every bit eleven weeks into pregnancy, though the results are wrong as much equally forty pct of the time. Nearly significant women in the United States go an ultrasound between 18 and 22 weeks of pregnancy that looks for fetal anomalies. At that signal, the fetus' sex activity can be determined with high accuracy. [5 Myths Nearly Women's Bodies]
Some people don't like to await that long. Chelsea Gladden, who blogs at breezymama.com, told LiveScience that she and her "bloated ankles" needed the excitement of finding out her baby's sex about halfway through the pregnancy, but said she would take found out before if she could have.
"I was definitely consumed with finding out," Gladden said.
But curiosity isn't the but reason for earlier gender testing. Sure genetic disorders are linked to the X chromosome, so they overwhelmingly affect males, whose XY sex chromosomes hateful they lack the "backup" 10 that women have. Families at risk for these disorders can at present opt to have amniocentesis, in which the fluid that cushions the fetus in the womb is extracted and tested, or a procedure called chorionic villus sampling, both of which carry a pocket-size risk of miscarriage.
A non-invasive blood test would cut down on such testing by 50 percent considering moms carrying female babies wouldn't need to worry, said Bianchi. Bianchi is on the advisory board and holds stock options in the biotechnology company Verinata Wellness, Inc., which has the goal of developing non-invasive fetal aberration tests.
Another disorder, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH, disrupts hormone residuum, resulting in a female person fetus taking on masculine traits. Moms carrying fetuses with CAH have steroids during their pregnancies, which can have unpleasant side effects. If fetal sex were known earlier, Bianchi said, the moms conveying male fetuses with CAH would be able to skip the steroids.
Chromosome-based diagnoses of gender are also of import to parents whose children are built-in with ambiguous ballocks. If an ultrasound reveals genitals that could be male or female, Bianchi said, knowing the babe is XX or XY tin can give parents a road map for what gender to raise the child. [The Truth About Genderless Babies]
Information technology'due south a boy! (or girl)
Blood tests for fetal gender aren't available clinically in the United states, Bianchi said, though they are used in Europe for diagnosis in high-adventure pregnancies. A number of companies practice sell claret and urine tests of fetal sex to parents online for several hundred dollars.
Bianchi and her colleagues combed through the scientific literature to observe studies on those claret and urine tests that employ fetal DNA from mom'south blood to place sex. Only males have Y chromosomes, then if Y chromosomes are found in mom'southward blood, she'southward likely carrying a baby boy. If no Y chromosomes are found, she's probably expecting a daughter.
After excluding studies that lacked information or were too small-scale, Bianchi and her squad came upwardly with 57 studies of prenatal sex tests to analyze. They found that urine tests were extremely unreliable, peradventure considering by the time fetal DNA is filtered from the blood into the urine, it's been broken downwards.
Blood tests, on the other hand, revealed fetal DNA quite early on. Before seven weeks, claret tests correctly identified male fetuses only 74.v percent of the fourth dimension. After seven weeks, however, accuracy went upwardly. Tests conducted betwixt vii and 20 weeks of pregnancy accurately identified baby boys about 95 pct of the time and baby girls about 99 percent of the fourth dimension. Afterward twenty weeks, these exam were extremely accurate, pegging boys as boys 99 percent of the fourth dimension and girls every bit girls 99.6 per centum of the time.
Parents of at-hazard pregnancies should talk with their doctors, Bianchi said, because blood tests could assist prevent more than invasive procedures down the road. Bianchi said she sends samples to the U.Grand. when she really needs a exam washed.
Simply for moms and dads who just want to know what colour to paint the nursery, Bianchi recommends patience.
"Currently, they would take to become to the Internet, and I would say that they should be wary," she said. "At that place is not a whole lot of transparency in those methods or the actual performance results."
The written report was funded past the National Human Genome Enquiry Found.
You lot tin follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook .
Stephanie Pappas is a contributing author for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archæology to the human encephalon and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Scientific discipline but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly mag of the American Psychological Clan. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science advice from the Academy of California, Santa Cruz.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/15475-blood-test-baby-sex-pregnancy.html
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