Supplemental Newborn Screening

The largest benefit of newborn screening is that you can identify and prevent a child from developing the catastrophic complications of these serious and life threatening disorders.

There is also the benefit of saving money by avoiding complications, including health care costs, and the costs of special education and other aspects of the care of these children if they are unidentified and untreated.

The cost of supplemental screening, which may not be covered by your insurance, is one of the negatives to testing.

You should also consider the cost of retesting and the worry that parents have to endure if there child has a false positive test, in which testing is positive, but on further testing the child is shown to be healthy.

Many doctors and parents don't consider testing important because they feel that they disorders are so rare, but if you consider that 1 baby in 20,000 is born with MCAD, then that is 200 children born with this disorder in the United States each year.

Still, the chances that any one child has one of these disorders is low, but many parents feel that since supplemental newborn screening is easy to do and isn't too expensive, that it is an important thing to do to be safe and have the piece of mind that their baby doesn't have one of these disorders.

If testing is so important, why aren't all babies tested for all of the different disorders that it is now possible to test for? That is a good question, and many organizations, including the March of Dimes, Save Babies Through Screening Foundation, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are working toward the goal that all children are automatically tested at birth.

Until that day, you can order a supplemental screening kit for your baby from a few different organizations, including:

• Pediatrix Screening - screens for more than 50 disorders for $89
• Institute of Metabolic Disease at Baylor - tests for 30 disorders for $25
• Expanded Newborn Screening Program at UCHSC - $25 to screen for over 20 disorders

In addition, you can raise awareness of the importance of newborn screening by taking part in a letter writing campaign to let your elected officials know that this is an important issue for you. If every state tested for these disorders, parents wouldn't have to worry about getting the testing done on their own.