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【科普】美TEMPE市生殖中心开展胚胎疾病检测服务
Betty Beard
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 6, 2006 12:00 AM
TEMPE - Fertility clinics not only help women get pregnant, they help them have healthier babies.
The Fertility Treatment Center in Tempe is offering one of the newest trends in fertility, prescreening embryos for about 60 genetic disorders such as Down syndrome and certain cancers.
"This list of 60 will be about 600 in two years," predicts Dr. Randall Craig, medical director at the fertility center in the Reproductive Medical Institute at Arizona State University Research Park.
But he can't say how much of an impact such testing will have on genetic disorders. After all, some disorders, such as muscular dystrophy, are based on mutations.
"Ask me in 20 years, and I can give you a better answer," he said.
The pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is available to any woman but is usually used for embryos that are fertilized in a petri dish at the center, a typical "test tube" baby. A single cell is removed from a nearly new embryo.
"The real trick is removing one cell. The embryo only has 11 or 12 or so," Craig said. "It never misses one. It just divides back up."
The cell is stained and, depending on the colors on its chromosomes, an expert can tell if the embryo has a disorder. If it's healthy, it is inserted in a woman's uterus. If not, the embryo is discarded.
Jane Maienschein, a biology and society professor at Arizona State University, said such tests have been around several years and are accepted as standard protocol.
She said it is better to have an embryo tested than a fetus so that if parents decide they don't want to bear a child with a disorder, they can discard an embryo rather than a fetus.
The embryonic screening is a safer alternative than amniocentesis, which involves inserting a needle into a uterus and carries a low risk of miscarriage, Craig said.
But because PGD can cost up to $18,000, it is usually used by women who are having babies by in vitro fertilization. Craig believes the costs will eventually come down.
Most centers send the single cells to a Detroit lab for testing, but the Tempe center is able to test them on-site.
The center moved from Chandler into a specially designed building last month that was designed to offer all the services required in fertility treatment, such as a pharmacy and lab, at one site. The center sees about 45 new patients a month. About 80 percent solve their infertility problems with drugs, insemination and other procedures. About 20 percent need in vitro fertilization, the creation of embryos in petri dishes.
The drugs can cost $100 to $200 a month or more, and more complex procedures, like in vitro fertilization, cost more than $10,000.
Fertility treatments are known for resulting in multiple births. Craig said the center is able to control that with certain drugs and by inserting only two embryos and freezing the rest. The result is that 32 percent of the patients get twins and less than 2 percent have triplets or more. [标签:content1][标签:content2]
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-01-09 17:14
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