Word: fetoprotein
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Testing is, of course, already commonplace. As many as 9 out of 10 pregnant women in the U.S. submit to some prenatal screening. Typically, this involves sampling the mother's blood--so-called serum-alpha-fetoprotein testing to seek out telltale proteins that may indicate spina bifida, neural-tube defects or Down syndrome--or looking directly at the fetus with ultrasound scans. For women over 35, doctors usually recommend more invasive procedures in which actual fetal cells are gathered from the womb's amniotic fluid (amniocentesis) or placenta (chorionic villus sampling...
That is why a report in the New England Journal of Medicine is so & significant: doctors in Maine and Rhode Island have shown that by using three blood tests -- for substances called alpha-fetoprotein, unconjugated estriol and chorionic gonadotrophin -- they could determine which young mothers were at highest risk for bearing afflicted children. The first test alone predicts Down syndrome correctly 35% of the time, but all three together boosted the rate to nearly 60%, thus targeting women who are most likely to benefit from amnio...
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