![]() Gifty Hammond prepares DNA samples at Myriad Genetics lab in South San Francisco.īut if you pay within 45 days, the price drops to $349. Norton agrees that family history is not a very sensitive screening tool. "In these types of diseases, 80 percent of the time there's no family history," says Jim Goldberg, chief medical officer of Myriad Women's Health. When both parents have a mutated version of the same gene, then their child is at an increased risk for developing a condition. One option that's rapidly growing in popularity is called an expanded carrier screening.Ībout a dozen lab companies, most based in the San Francisco Bay Area, can scan a patient's blood or saliva for hundreds of conditions that their child could inherit.Ī perfectly healthy parent can pass along an autosomal recessive disease like cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs, if their partner is also a carrier for the disease. The prenatal genetic testing industry is projected to grow nearly 30 percent over the next five years.Ī wide variety of tests are now available to screen both fetus and parents. Silicon Valley is a hotbed for companies vying for the business of concerned future parents. Mary Norton, a prenatal geneticist at University of California, San Francisco. ![]() "Over the last 10 to 20 years the number of genetic disorders that we are able to test for has exploded," says Dr. But now a growing number of companies offer extensive panels testing for hundreds of rare diseases. In the past, doctors may have screened parents for a few suspect diseases common to their specific ethnicity or family history. Glut of information available to expecting parents "And, so I just wanted to have all the information that I could." "I had a high-risk pregnancy, and there had been a lot of complications prior to this," says Shara. Shara had a history of rare disease in her family. When their doctor offered extensive genetic testing to check the health of their fetus, the couple leaped at the opportunity. Shara spent four months of her pregnancy on bedrest. Unfortunately the San Mateo, Calif., couple's struggles continued. Shara and her husband, Robert, were elated when she reached her second trimester, the phase when the highest risk of miscarriage subsides. With the help of several medications, she successfully carried a child last year. ![]() In 2016, she was devastated by two miscarriages. It wasn't hard for Shara Watkins to get pregnant. Shara and Robert Watkins hold their 5-month-old daughter, Kaiya, in their home in San Mateo, Calif., just after she had woken up from an afternoon nap.
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