Baby's sex can be revealed at just SEVEN weeks with new blood test

Experts warn the test could be misused to terminate a pregnancy on gender grounds
This is a boy or a girl? "is one of the first questions parents-to-be wants to know the answer.
Now, thanks to a simple blood test can tell with surprising accuracy in about seven weeks.
Although not widely offered by doctors, gender screening blood tests have been sold to online consumers in recent years.

Now researchers have found that actually provide fast and accurate results.

The test looks for small parts of the male sex chromosomes in the mother's blood and reveals whether a mother is carrying a baby as early as seven weeks.

The team, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said the test may be especially valuable for families that host sex-linked genetic disorders such as hemophilia.

Because these disorders strike mostly children, knowing that the baby is a girl could do without the mother's diagnostic procedures such as amniocentesis, which carry a small risk of miscarriage.

"You could reduce the number of invasive procedures are performed for specific genetic conditions," said study author Dr. Diana Bianchi.

The method called cell-free fetal DNA is available in many European hospitals and costs around £ 255. It is currently not available from doctors in the United States but is available online.

"What we are finding in England is that many women will have invasive tests, said Dr. Bianchi.

Today's Poll

It is seven weeks is too early to know the sex of a baby?

Yes, have a

All polls

In such procedures, doctors or extract some of the fluid surrounding the fetus, but this may cause a small number of mothers to abort.

However, some researchers warned that the test could be used to terminate a pregnancy if the baby is not the desired sex.

"The thing to consider is the ethics of this," said Dr. Mary Rosser Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

"If parents use it to determine the sex and abortion on the grounds that it could be a problem.

"Remember, gender is not a disease."

A new look at the medical evidence for the blood test, Bianchi and her colleagues analyzed 57 previous studies involving more than 6,500 pregnancies.

Found parents could rely on the test of 98.8 percent of the time when he said he would have a child, and 94.8 percent of the time when a girl said.

The current non-invasive alternative - an ultrasound performed in the late first trimester (12 weeks) - is not always good at detecting the sex of the baby.