There are many ways to test for genetic material. Hair follicles, cheek swabs, blood tests. These are all common methods we’ve heard of before and generally speaking, you would be able to find out if you were the father or not in a matter of days.
Though, what if you already know you’re the father but you don’t know anything about your baby? How would you test for the genetic material and more importantly, the genetic health of your unborn child? This is where cell free DNA or cffDNA testing comes into play. This testing method is a non-invasive prenatal diagnosis that collects fetal DNA floating around in the mother’s blood stream that can then be used to test for a wide range of conditions such as inherited genetic disorders or even the sex of the fetus. A cell free dna extraction kit is used within the test.
If required, most parents will likely choose to take this route of prenatal testing as other methods include invasive procedures that have a low chance of damaging the fetus, or even placing the pregnancy at risk. A cell free DNA test only requires a maternal blood sample which can be easily obtained through venepuncture with no risk to the fetus, mother or the pregnancy and although fetal DNA is present after the 5th week of pregnancy, most procedures are only done after the 10th week.
The time it takes to get the results can vary depending on the circumstances. In most cases, parents should expect to receive their results in around a week’s time, though this is only the case if the sample is easy to test. As the fetal DNA in the mother’s bloodstream averages at around 11-13%, getting a pure sample of the fetus’ DNA is not always immediately possible. These limitations can, of course, be tackled in a variety of ways such as cell free DNA purification, which is a technique that utilises centrifugation – a rapidly rotating container used to separate fluids of different densities – to separate the plasma and then isolate the cell free DNA to be used for testing.
There are other methods of testing for genetic mutations such as shotgun sequencing, mass spectrometry or detection of mRNA from genes in the placenta. These are different ways of reaching the same conclusions that might need some extra testing time and like I previously mentioned, these tests fully depend on the circumstances.
For the most part, parents claim to have received the test results in a matter of weeks. This can range from one to three weeks but none have reported the test taking longer than that - and the truth of the matter is that it very rarely does so, making it one of the fastest ways to find out some critical information about your future human being.
Think of cell free DNA testing as a very fast, pre-emptive method to diagnose your baby’s health and as an added bonus, you’ll now know what colour balloons to lean towards when the time comes.
