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.
The test could conceivably help parents who are worried about gender-related diseases, but it could also allow people to wade into the morally murky waters of sex selection. The test analyzes fetal DNA found in a mother's blood, according to a report in the New York Times. If a Y chromosome is present, the mother is having a boy; if it's not, it probably means the fetus is female (but could also mean that blood sample doesn't contain fetal DNA). Researchers examined 57 studies of fetal DNA tests, spanning some 6,500 pregnancies.