Dr. Werlin's Fertility World

On November 17, a segment was aired on my local NBC station on couples paying big bucks to choose the sex of the baby in the United States. Primarily, this topic was a discussion about sex selection and utilizing the process of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, for that purpose. Unfortunately, the primary point of this discussion was in fact sex selection whereas the primary purpose for preimplantation genetic diagnosis was not even discussed. PGD is a process that is utilized for a number of different scenarios.

PGD is primarily used for couples who have certain types of genetic defects that they do not wish to transfer on to their children. An example of this might be cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, sickle cell disease, retinitis pigmentosa, any number of different hereditary diseases that could be prevented by using the process of PGD.

The second use for PGD is in fact to help to prevent certain chromosome abnormalities occurring in certain high risk patients: for example, women who have advanced maternal age, women who have recurrent pregnancy loss, couples in whom the male has severe male factor, which is less than a million motile sperm, couples who fail two or more IVF cycles which would be thought to be implantation failures, and couples who have previous histories of chromosomally abnormal embryos. All are at greater risk for having embryos that have aneuploidy. Aneuploidy is defined as an embryo that has either too many or not enough chromosomes. The most common example of aneuploidy that most people know of is in fact trisomy 21, or Down’s syndrome. These women in those high risk groups are at greater risk for having abnormal embryos, and thus PGD can be used to in fact rule that problem out by screening those embryos, looking for specific chromosome abnormalities.

So I think it is important that when looking at preimplantation genetic diagnosis, although sex selection can be done or family balancing can be done, the true primary effect or the primary use for preimplantation genetic diagnosis is to prevent certain hereditary diseases from being passed on and to rule out certain chromosome abnormalities. I think that is the primary benefit of using it and that is what should be looked at as well.

If you want to read more about this story click on this link, http://www.nbc4.tv/drhensel/10348703/detail.html