Pregnant women need to face the problem of prenatal screening during pregnancy, especially with the increasing number of elderly mothers. Prenatal screening is particularly important for this group of pregnant women. DNA testing sounds very mysterious, and many mothers are not sure what methods DNA testing is achieved through. So, what are the methods for prenatal DNA testing?
Generally speaking, the safer method for prenatal DNA testing is to extract blood from pregnant women for examination. This method is called non-invasive DNA prenatal testing technology and can also be used for amniocentesis.
The non-invasive DNA testing method is very simple for pregnant women. They only need to contribute a small amount of venous blood. The following tasks are left to the doctor. The doctor can sequence the free DNA fragments present in the mother's peripheral plasma through corresponding technology testing. After bioinformatics analysis, some genetic information about the baby can be obtained to determine whether the baby has the three major chromosomal diseases. Generally, pregnant women can undergo this test after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
However, if there are high-risk factors for prenatal examination in early and mid pregnancy, such as mothers who are severely obese, mothers who became pregnant through embryo transfer, mothers who have given birth to abnormal fetuses due to chromosomal abnormalities, or mothers with multiple pregnancies but still need to be cautious when undergoing this examination.
Amniotic fluid aspiration requires the extraction of amniotic fluid from pregnant women as a specimen for experimental examination. Through examination, the fetal chromosomes can be analyzed and genetic testing can be performed. Compared with other DNA tests, it has the highest accuracy. However, amniocentesis is an invasive examination that may sometimes cause certain damage to the fetus, but the probability is not high, and mothers do not need to worry too much.
