Researchers have developed a revolutionary blood test which could allow pregnant women to know the sex of their unborn baby as early as five weeks. A research team from Cheil General Hospital in Seoul, South Korea, found that different proportion of two enzymes that can extracted from blood of the pregnant woman, signify the gender of a baby as early as five weeks.
Identifying the sex of foetus early is significant to know if the mother is a carrier of an X-chromosome gene which can cause a disease like muscular dystrophy or haemophilia, explained lea author Dr Hyun Mee Ryu. Female fetuses are either carrier or are free from disease. But, a male foetus has fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease.
Therefore couples may choose to abort the pregnancy. However, this technique might encourage the possibility for sex selection. So there should be watchful contemplation about the use of this investigative tool in clinical condition. Existing ultrasounds can detect a baby’s sex at around five months, while invasive testing cannot be performed until eleven weeks.
But these tests carry a one to two per cent risk of miscarriage as they require a sample from the amniotic sac that protects the foetus. In the meantime ultrasounds do not disclose a baby’s outward genitalia and therefore the gender, until well into the second trimester, cannot be read correctly.
However, their test could diminish the need for invasive procedures in pregnant women carrying X-associated chromosomal abnormality and elucidate inconclusive readings by ultrasound, stated Dr Hyu. For their study research team collected maternal plasma from more than two hundred pregnant women, in the first trimester of their pregnancy.
They were capable of flawlessly identifying the gender of the baby from as early as five weeks by calculating the ratio of the amount of the enzymes DYS14 and GAPDH in the blood plasma. The study findings were published in The FASEB Journal.
Though further study must be done prior to such a test is available extensively, this paper does show it is possible to envisage the sex of a child as early as the first few weeks after conception, explained Dr Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of the journal which published the study.