Can parents carrying the hemolytic gene give birth to a healthy baby?

This is an automatically translated article.

The article is professionally consulted by Master, Doctor Truong Thanh Tam - Pediatrician - Department of Pediatrics - Neonatology - Vinmec Danang International General Hospital. Dr. Tam has 15 years of experience working in the field of Pediatrics.
There are many babies with hemolytic disease because parents do not screen for the disease before birth, requiring blood transfusion and treatment almost for life. Some children with the disease only live a few years.

1. Parents carrying the hemolytic gene can give birth to a healthy baby

Before becoming pregnant, parents carrying the hemolytic gene together perform in-vitro screening and testing to raise embryos. When a healthy embryo is transferred to the mother's uterus, it develops into a normal baby. This is how medicine helps couples carrying the hemolytic gene to have healthy babies.
To date, many cases of Thalassemia, spinal muscular atrophy and other chromosomal diseases have been screened successfully. The cost depends on the number of diseased embryos.
If couples come to the doctor when detecting the disease late, 20 weeks pregnant, it cannot be cured anymore, forced to terminate the pregnancy. Therefore, performing pre-marital health examination and disease screening is extremely necessary to avoid unfortunate cases.

2. Pre-marital examination to prevent hemophilia

With pre-marital screening tests, couples preparing for marriage and pregnancy can help prevent congenital hemolytic disease as well as other genetic diseases.

Pre-marital genetic counseling helps control the birth of children between two carriers or one of them.
Specifically with Thalassemia disease, if a couple carrying the same form of Thalassemia is pregnant, they need amniocentesis for prenatal diagnosis at a specialized medical facility.
Medicine can intervene to help two people with Thalassemia gene completely have healthy children.

3. Thalassemia screening in pregnancy

Through tests and analyses, screening for Thalassemia during pregnancy helps find mutated genes during pregnancy. If both husband and wife carry the gene, the fetus has a 25% chance of having severe disease, this case requires prenatal diagnosis by amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling. This is an effective and cost-effective method.
Screening for Thalassemia is performed in pregnant women in the first 3 months, the mother's blood is taken for testing to detect abnormalities, thereby giving reasonable intervention.

Prenatal diagnosis is carried out as follows:
DNA test of 2 parents, analysis of mutability. Amniocentesis or chorionic villus biopsies with a pregnant mother. Amniotic fluid or placental DNA test. Counseling to terminate the pregnancy if the fetus has severe disease. Use of pregnancy termination services (Obstetrics). One of the methods being deployed at Vinmec International General Hospital to screen for fetal malformations as well as for thalassemia screening is the non-invasive screening method NIPT.
During pregnancy, in the mother's blood, in addition to her own DNA, there is also the free DNA of the fetus. Instead of amniocentesis, which has a direct effect on the fetus, the non-invasive prenatal screening method (NIPT) is much safer because only 20ml of blood is taken from the mother's vein from the 9th week of pregnancy onwards. Go to DNA sequencing. This result will help experts detect fetuses with high risk of abnormalities of some chromosomes such as Down syndrome, Patau, Edward, Turner, Thalassemia,...
At the same time reduce the rate pregnant women with unnecessary amniocentesis. The outstanding advantage of this method is that it is non-invasive and can be carried out as early as the 9th week of pregnancy. Older pregnant women, families with children with birth defects... should choose NIPT from early pregnancy.

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