Many Genetic Diseases Are Preventable

Nearly 300,000 children are born in Australia each year. Many healthy parents are taken by surprise when their child is born with a life-threatening genetic disorder. These parents may be carriers: healthy individuals who have a faulty (mutated) version of a critical gene.

Testing Allows Prevention

Why wait until the birth of a child with a genetic disorder to access screening. Early testing is the only way to know if your pregnancy will be at high risk and to enable you to take specific actions to have a healthy child. The team at Primary Care Genetics can advise on preconceptional screening and options such as pre-implantation or prenatal genetic diagnosis. Every adult should be offered genetic testing before pregnancy.

Universal Genetic Screening

Each ethnic group has disorders that occur more commonly. The paradigm for understanding and developing screening programs for genetic disorders is the Jewish community- this has moved from Tay-Sachs Disease screening to expanded screening programs. Now it is possible for any individual to access a universal screening program that encompasses common disorders within and across different ethnicities. This can be done in a single relatively inexpensive test for all ethnic groups. Primary Care Genetics understands how a universal test relates to an individual couple.