Weird symptoms in your infant making you worry? Get assurance with this new technology!
Having a newborn in the ICU can be a scary experience. While the doctors are busy caring for your child, allow us to bring you clarity about what’s going on.
DON’T PANIC!
Are you a new parent to a NICU baby? Congrats, and STAY CALM! You may be thinking “why me?”, “why my baby?”, “no one else is facing this, why am I?”, “what’s going to happen?”. Let’s tackle this tough time together.
My baby is the only one here!
Are you sure? Look again! Around 1 in 10 babies born in hospitals require intensive care. This can be for Prematurity, Sepsis, Heart problems, Respiratory Distress Syndrome or other reasons. India’s Infant Mortality Rate or IMR is relatively better at only 25 in 1000 live births. Thanks to modern medicine, you can ease your worries.
Whew! Then why even worry?
Around 3 – 4% of babies in the NICU are born with genetic abnormalities. This isn’t very alarming until you know that 20% of infant deaths are caused by genetic disorders. So if your baby has a genetic disorder then they are at a much higher risk!
Why did this happen to us?
Gene therapy is quicker and easier in infants due to the presence of stem cells within their body. The longer you wait the less of a chance there is to save them from any genetic disease they may have.
That sucks! How could we have known?
There are options like family genetic counselling and early warning genetic tests that you can do before or right after the birth of your child (like NBS!) but it is usually too late for these at the stage when symptoms are already showing in your infant.
Then how do we find out what’s wrong?
One of the most comprehensive DNA testing techniques for infants is called Next Generation Sequencing. This process looks through your child’s DNA and compares it to healthy DNA. Like this, we can find the gene defect that might be causing your child distress. This will allow the doctor to focus on the defective gene and accordingly prescribe treatment.
Depending upon the symptoms, the doctor may order a Whole Exome Sequencing (WES) which looks only through the working genes (the exome) of a certain part of your child’s body, or a Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS), which looks through all the genes.
We see you.
We have developed our own fast acting diagnosis option to provide a comprehensive care option to NICU babies using NGS. Send us a DM if you want to know more!
Sources:
- TOI
- statista.com
- Qin D. (2019). Next-generation sequencing and its clinical application. Cancer biology & medicine, 16(1), 4–10. https://doi.org/10.20892/j.issn.2095-3941.2018.0055
- Govt of India press release
- Robert L. Goldenberg, Shivaprasad S. Goudar, Avinash Kavi, Nancy F. Krebs, Richard J. Derman, Sarah Saleem, Elizabeth M. McClure, Improving maternal, neonatal and child health outcomes in low‐resource settings: Translating research evidence to practice – report from The Third International Conference on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 10.1111/1471-0528.17609, 130, S3, (4-7), (2023).
- Sundaram, V., Chirla, D., Panigrahy, N. et al. Current Status of NICUs in India: A Nationwide Survey and the Way Forward. Indian J Pediatr 81, 1198–1204 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12098-014-1489-1
- Karthik Nagesh N, Razak A. Current status of neonatal intensive care in India. Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed. 2016 May;101(3):F260-5. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2015-308169. Epub 2016 Mar 4. PMID: 26944066.
- Wilcken and Wiley (2015) Fifty years of newborn screening. J Paediatr Child Health.; 51(1): 103-7. PMID: 25586852
- 5 Wren et. al. (2012) Mortality in infants with cardiovascular malformations. Eur J Pediatr.; 171(2): 281-7. PMID: 21748291
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