Abstract
To the Editor. —The recent CONSENSUS CONFERENCE report on newborn screening for hemoglobinopathies 1 skipped one potential screening strategy, namely, prenatal maternal hemoglobin electrophoresis. If the mother has hemoglobin AA, there is no way the newborn could inherit any serious hemoglobinopathy. Newborn screening of such pregnancies, therefore, will only provide information for genetic counseling of the following generation. The chances that this information will survive intact to be passed on to a teenager 15 years later are not overwhelming. Maternal blood is obtained more easily than neonatal blood, and when a prenatal maternal hemoglobin level is normal, there does not currently seem to be much reason to subject the baby to a repeated determination. Moreover, in most cases, this will mean only a single test per mother, regardless of the total number of pregnancies, yielding a significant cost savings in the long run.
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