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Baby Jaden decided to arrive more than three months early. His dad was off at boot camp
and
his mom was totally unprepared for the baby's arrival and the challenges that followed.
When he was born he was one pound five ounces.
Every day you come in and you hope for the best but you expect the worst
and it takes a toll on you emotionally. Premature
babies like Jaden have a variety of problems with breathing,
digestion and development
. It's taken him quite a while but he finally
got off the ventilator and he's doing so good
now .
A team from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah has developed a test
to predict which moms might have their babies early, an important discovery that could improve
infant medical care and survival . We are able to examine blood and find
molecules--primarily peptides and proteins--that are different in women who are going to go
on to have these problems. We're able to pick out about eighty and in some cases as high
as ninety percent of women who will have a later pre-term birth.
This is eight weeks prior to the onset of symptoms
so we hope that this will become a test that
we can offer to every woman that's pregnant and kind of narrow down the ones that are
at highest risk so that we can really focus on them
. Pre-term births account for seventy-five percent
of infant mortality and medical complications so if doctors can identify women who might
have their babies early they can take steps to prolong the pregnancy
. If we can even prolong the pregnancy by
one or two weeks we can make a very big impact
on the number of babies that survive and make sure that those that survive are healthy.
It gives the doctor a very important tool
to assess the health of the woman who's sitting in front of him
.