Newborn heel blood screening method

Newborn heel blood screening is a method of checking the child's heel blood after the birth of the newborn to ensure that the child has no physical illness and whether the child is healthy. In the following article, let's learn about the process of newborn heel blood screening.

What diseases are screened for in newborns?

Newborn disease screening is a laboratory diagnosis of the newborn's blood to detect certain congenital, hereditary, and metabolic diseases at an early stage, so as to avoid serious harm such as intellectual and physical development disorders in children through timely and effective treatment.

Newborn disease screening mainly targets a type of congenital, hereditary metabolic diseases that may have a serious impact on the child's growth and intellectual development during the neonatal period. Since the incidence of diseases varies from region to region, the types of diseases screened are also different. For example, the diseases screened in Nanjing are mainly phenylketonuria, congenital hypothyroidism and congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

My child looks healthy, do I need to be screened?

Even for children with congenital defects, most do not have obvious specific symptoms in the early stages. Usually, some particularly obvious clinical symptoms will appear 3-6 months after birth or even after 1 year old. However, by then, the child's intelligence and body organs may have suffered irreversible damage, manifested as growth retardation, mental retardation, disability and other serious consequences, which cannot be reversed even with treatment. Therefore, children who appear healthy on the surface should also be screened.

72 hours after the baby is born and starts breastfeeding, the hospital where the baby is born will be responsible for collecting the baby's capillary blood and making a dried blood smear. In order to ensure the accuracy of screening, centralized testing is now adopted, that is, the collected blood samples are sent to professional screening centers for testing. Currently, the most commonly used method for newborns is to collect blood samples by acupuncture on the medial or lateral edge of the heel.

In the article above, I introduced newborn heel blood screening. First of all? It is to better prevent children from various diseases. The role of prevention and examination can better and quickly diagnose whether the child is healthy.