Scientists have found a way to diagnose autism in a child before birth
A group of scientists from the Rensselaer Institute under the direction of Prof. Jürgen Hahn found a way to diagnose autism in a child before he is born. A special technique that has been developed by experts will help calculate the risk of giving birth to the crumbs with autism during pregnancy.
According to scientists, the risk of having such a “special” child is about 10 times higher in women who already have children with autism. The rest of this risk is approximately 1.7%.
To assess the physiological factors that formed the basis of the developed methodology, scientists had to divide women into two groups.
One included pregnant women who, according to experts, had an increased risk of having a baby with autism. In the other group there were women with baseline baseline risk below the alarm threshold.
Experts in the field of laboratory diagnostics also came to the aid of scientists. They did blood tests for women from both groups. As a result, in the high-risk group, specific metabolites were found in the blood of women, which cause brain pathologies in children.
Specific metabolites characteristic of the development of autism, the same group of scientists was able to find last year.
The leader of the research team, Jürgen Khan, believes that introduction of such an analysis into the compulsory screening program for pregnant women will allow women to know in advance about the high risks and make a decision whether to continue the pregnancy or terminate it
Today, as part of prenatal screenings, only high risks of chromosomal abnormalities are revealed - Down syndrome, Turner, Edwards and several others.
The accuracy of the new analysis exceeds 90%. Now the Hana group has begun to develop the test with greater accuracy. Scientists plan to improve the development so that the accuracy of the analysis is at least 97-99%.
Doctors from different countries are already interested in the development, since until that moment it was not possible to predict autism. In children, such a diagnosis for the first time could be established no earlier than after the child is three years old.
Autism is a violation of the autism spectrum, in which a child reacts painfully to the world around him with all his loud sounds, bright colors and people. Such kids often live in a fictional worldthey have big problems with communication, interaction with others, with learning.
According to statistics, up to 1-1.6% of children suffer from autism, and this mental disorder is diagnosed four times less in girls than in boys. Over the past 25 years, the number of children with this diagnosis has increased significantly throughout the world. What is the reason, scientists do not yet know.
