4 ms·
My niece in Australia has a rare genetic disorder and when my wife and I had our first baby in California a few years ago we were concerned about that. We also
by bigtones 1y ago
My niece in Australia has a rare genetic disorder and when my wife and I had our first baby in California a few years ago we were concerned about that. We also had fantastic insurance and the hospital team there did a test where they took a blood sample from my wife and seperated the childs DNA from the mothers in the blood sample and tested it for several genetic disorders. That test is not available in Australia even today.
- ykl 1y agoIncredibly that test (cell-free fetal DNA - cfDNA) is now standard in California, to the point where most expecting parents in California now learn the baby’s gender super early. We learned our baby’s gender only 10 weeks into pregnancy because of the cfDNA test.
- skissane 1y ago> That test is not available in Australia even today. Pretty much every lab test is available in Australia if you are willing to pay for it; if they don’t have a local lab capable of running the test, they’ll send the sample overseas The real question is whether it is covered by insurance or not, and a lot of the time the answer is “no” - I recently forked out over US$500 for genetic tests on one of our kids (which the paediatrician recommended), although the results weren’t particularly helpful (“rare variant of uncertain clinical significance”)