Researchers are working to decode the DNA of hundreds of infant to see if the practice should be used to routinely look for health risks in newborns.
One of the problems with this type of sequencing is that knowing one has the "breast cancer gene" or risk factors for other conditions at such a young age could result in needless worrying, the Associated Press reported via Bloomberg Businessweek.
Most babies born in the U.S. have blood taken from their heel at birth; the sample is used to test for about 30 diseases. A few thousand babies are protected from consequences of rare diseases through this method every year.
A "genetic blueprint" would go above and beyond what these blood samples can tell medical professionals.
"If I truly believed that knowing one's genome was going to be transformative to medicine over the next decade or more, then wouldn't I want to start generating that information around the time of birth?" Dr. John Niederhuber, former director of the National Cancer Institute who now oversees one of the largest baby-sequencing research projects to date said, the AP reported.
Niederhuber's Inova Translational Medicine Institute is working to map newborns' genomes and compare them with older family members. The researchers hope to identify genetic patterns that point to a variety of health problems.
Parents will have to make the decision whether or not to have medical staff tell them up front if their child has a gene mutation that is already known to come with serious health issues.
"If it was something that we could hopefully prevent through diet or exercise or some kind of lifestyle change, we could start with that as early as possible," Nurse Holly Sloan, who signed her daughter Amelia up for the program, told the AP. "I guess I'm just the type of person, I would rather know and address it."
Sloan has not received any troubling results from her daughter's test so far.
