Research reported in the New England Journal of Medicine this week has shown that prenatal diagnosis with gene chips is superior to conventional chromosome analysis in detecting many kinds of abnormalities in a developing fetus. This is not a big...
Category: birth defects
6Dec 2012
Research reported in the New England Journal of Medicine this week has shown that prenatal diagnosis with gene chips is superior to conventional chromosome analysis in detecting many kinds of abnormalities in a developing fetus. This is not a big surprise--one would expect that taking a closer look at the genes would reveal more problems. But it was a tricky story to cover; the details are important.
Marilyn Marchione of The Associated Press backs in to the story, reporting in her second graf that "a surprisingly high number - 6 percent - of certain fetuses declared normal by conventional testing (known as karyotyping) were found to have genetic abnormalities by gene scans," she wrote. That was the news. Her first graf began with a likely consequence of...
Andrew Pollack reports in The New York Times this week on a new kind of genetic testing that can reveal more...
Andrew Pollack reports in The New York Times this week on a new kind of genetic testing that can reveal more abnormalities than the standard tests done to examine fetuses during pregnancy.
The test uses a gene chip to scan for a wide variety of potential problems, he reports, but "it is not always possible to tell whether a small abnormality detected by the chip will be harmful to a child, or if so, how severe such a problem will be." It's a solid story, and nobody else seems to have written it (with one exception; more about that in a minute). This appears to be a scoop by the Times.
But it isn't. Pollack reports that the findings, which he says have not yet been published, were presented in February at a meeting of the...
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