Results of non-invasive prenatal testing compare well to those from invasive methods, with better safety and cost

While noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) has revolutionized prenatal diagnostics by allowing the detection of a number of genetic problems in a fetus, it is currently limited and thus misses many genetic causes of abnormalities.

But a new technique, to be presented at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics, introduces a technology called noninvasive fetal sequencing (NIFS) that will simultaneously screen almost 23,000 genes, as well as all of the conditions currently captured by NIPT, in pregnancies both with and without a previously detected fetal anomaly. ...