THE HAGUE (ANP) – It would be good if all people who want a child were given the opportunity to have it checked before conception whether they are carriers of a hereditary condition. With such a check, parents can make “informed choices regarding reproduction”, says the Health Council. If both parents are carriers of the same condition, they can pass it on to the child.
The council does not yet recommend that the tests be offered everywhere, but it does advise finding out how this can best be done. The Health Council advocates a pilot study. This should make it clear “what the best way is to reach all prospective parents with the offer”. For example, the screening could be combined with other help for prospective parents.
Prospective parents can already get tested. For people from risk groups who are known to have a high chance of being carriers, this is done through health insurance. Others have to pay for it themselves. But this does not reach everyone, says the Health Council.
Genetic material
According to the council, there is approximately a 1 percent chance that both parents are carriers of the same disease. If so, they won’t notice it themselves. But if they indeed have the same condition in their hereditary material, there is a 25 percent chance that their child will develop that disease. There is usually no treatment for such conditions, “these conditions are often accompanied by a greatly reduced quality of life, shortened life expectancy and therefore serious suffering for both the child and the family.”
Of every four hundred children born, one has such a condition. This concerns, for example, muscle disease SMA, cystic fibrosis, Meckel syndrome or Tay-Sachs disease. According to the Health Council, it is up to the medical sector itself to decide which diseases will ultimately be tested for. The council believes that thousands of parents could make use of the screening every year, and that several hundred of them would discover that they both have the same condition.
Want to have children
If parents know that they are both carriers of a disease, they can “choose to accept that risk”, according to the Health Council. They can also decide that they do not want to father children after all, or they can ask a donor to help. Another option is for parents to have the embryos tested and only have healthy embryos replaced. And if it turns out during pregnancy that the child has the hereditary condition, parents can terminate the pregnancy.
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2023-11-17 14:01:32
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