The percentage of premature births has been growing in recent decades and researchers do not stop working to try to find the causes in order to prevent them, since premature births put babies' lives at risk and involve a high cost to Healing
The last practical element that can help mothers and professionals a lot does not have so much to do with knowing the cause of a premature birth, but in knowing if a pregnancy will end up being premature, and that is that have invented a device capable of analyzing the DNA of the fetus that detects the risk of both premature delivery and that the mother ends up suffering from preeclampsia.
The device has been developed at the Rovira and Virgili University of Tarragona and has the function of isolating the fetal DNA from the maternal plasma to perform the test that will tell if the mother will have a premature birth or if she will suffer from a disease related to pregnancy, being a of the most known and serious preeclampsia.
As they explain it is a device the size of a credit card, to use and throw away and non-invasive, although I do not quite understand how it performs the test if it is to get plasma from the mother, that is, blood. Maybe, since can be used from 5 weeks gestation, the analysis can be done in the laboratory when doing the first pregnancy analysis.
With regard to preeclampsia, we know that it affects 10% of pregnant women, being a serious disease that, if not known or treated, can cause the mother's death from cerebral hemorrhage. Knowing in advance that a woman will most likely suffer from preeclampsia can cause prevention to begin with medication before it happens, in addition to giving the woman a series of recommendations such as not smoking, avoiding stress, taking tension, get specific blood tests, etc.
Now what has to happen is that the device advances at the level of patent registration and that it begins to be marketed so that companies that wish to use it or even the national health system make use of it. Hopefully, if it works as they say, we will see it soon as another resource to know the state of pregnancy and to be able to prevent possible complications early May they arrive.
