New blood test for Down's that lowers risk of miscarriage: Screening more accurate and safer for babies. By Jenny Hope Published: 04:00 GMT, 4 September 2012 | Updated: 06:48 GMT, 4 September 2012 Ultrasound: Currently women are offered a screening towards the end of their first trimester Doctors have developed a blood test for pregnant women that can detect 99 per cent of Down’s syndrome babies without risking a miscarriage. The test is used in the 12th week of pregnancy and could save hundreds of healthy babies being lost each year. It examines DNA in cells from the unborn baby found in the mother’s blood and looks for evidence of chromosomal abnormalities that cause Down’s and similar genetic disorders.
A study by the foetal medicine specialist Professor Kypros Nicolaides in London shows the Harmony prenatal test is highly accurate at a very early stage in pregnancy. It is one of several in development promising a new era in prenatal screening that will be available not only to those at high risk of having a Down’s baby, but routinely used to reassure all pregnant women. IVF and the great lie about fertility and the over-40s... My mother was 29 when she had me, and used to joke about what an old mum that made her. For as long as I can remember, the same message has been drummed into women — your fertility diminishes after 35, so your chances of becoming a mother dwindle, particularly after 40. Of course nobody can argue with the biological reality that younger women are more fertile than older women. But what if fertility isn’t quite the clear-cut issue we often perceive it to be?
Blessed: Deborah Bucknall fell pregnant with her son Oliver when she was 44 What if women of 38 and over were needlessly spending thousands of pounds on IVF to get pregnant? Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics show that live births to mothers aged 40 and over have nearly doubled in the past decade, and the Mail revealed that the number of women having abortions in their 40s has risen by almost a third in ten years. So what is going on? When I did meet a man and he asked if I wanted a baby, I laughed. Her eyes wide with fear, my child was choking to death - and I didn't know what to do. By Kate Hilpern Updated: 07:17 GMT, 5 July 2011 Kate Hilpern with her daughter Lucy who choked on a blueberry recently Louise Hill felt as though her heart stopped the moment she saw her 18-month-old son, Toby, put a grape in his mouth.
‘Like many parents, I always cut up his grapes. But this time, he was sitting with some older children at a friend’s house and before I could do anything, he grabbed one off their plate and shoved it in his mouth, laughing. ‘I can remember thinking: “Please, please don’t swallow it whole and choke” — but that’s exactly what he did,’ says Louise, 41, a full-time mum who lives in Hampshire. The signs were clear — the desperate look in Toby’s eyes, his flapping arms, his reddening face and his inability to make even the smallest sound. Louise grabbed him from his chair and thumped him on the back again and again.
‘My instinct was to call an ambulance, so I grabbed the phone,’ recalls Louise. ‘But as I was talking to them, he became unconscious. Pregnancy, baby and toddler health information at BabyCentre UK. Cambridge Baby Yoga, Antenatal Yoga, Pregnancy Yoga, Baby Massage, Baby Swimming, Aqua Yoga and Active Birth Workshops in Cambridge.