To their dismay, patients have to pay for the drug tests at their own (or their insurersâ) expense. Carol, a chronic pain patient who had been treated for seven years by the same clinic without any testing, reports that she was billed $325 for a urine screen.
Reviewed by Brunilda Nazario, MD. May 2, 2012 -- Researchers say they've found a way to identify the father of a baby as early as the eighth week of pregnancy. The new method, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, uses fetal DNA isolated from the mother's blood.
Previously, DNA tests looked at only a few dozen DNA sequences on either the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA. Because only men carry the Y chromosome, only men could take a Y-DNA test. As a result, Y-DNA test results would follow just the males in a single paternal line â fathers and sons. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) tests, on the other hand, could be taken by anyone. But the test results traced only an all-female line moving from mother to grandmother to great-grandmother, and so on.