My first child has severe asthma. Can antenatal screening of a foetus detect the risk of developing asthma?
Doctors cannot even consider genetic screening for asthma until we know more about the genes responsible for predisposing a person to asthma. Even then, given that the severity of asthma varies markedly between individuals, it is unlikely that we would be able to predict how severe the disease would be, even if we knew the important genes in a particular family.Most people with asthma have relatively mild symptoms that can be controlled with low doses of inhaled medication. Even if your second child were to develop asthma, it does not follow that he or she will have the severe problems that your first child has had. So, I think antenatal screening would be inappropriate even if we could say exactly which genes we should be looking for.
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