Remnants of Babies Say with Mothers for Years Print

Remnants of babies stay with mothers for years

ROCKLAND COUNTY JOURNAL NEWS, Tuesday September 10, 1996

Karl Leif Bates Gannott News Service


Mothers and children have a special bond, and it is deeper than you might imagine.

It turns out a mother carries in her bloodstream, for decades after they are born, a little piece of every baby she has had.

A research team that includes a Wayne State University (Detroit) professor stumbled across the discovery while trying to develop a noninvasive test for detecting birth defects.

The finding raises a host of interesting questions, not the least of which is how the obviously alien cells manage to eke out a living for decades without attracting attention from the mother's immune system.

"Everybody's curious about this' said Dr. Mark Evans, a medical professor and member of the team. But the goal of the study is to develop a reliable test for birth defects, a task that may take several more years.

As part of its research, the team drew the blood of pregnant women and screened the blood for fetal cells.

In the blood samples from women who ended up having female children they found Y chromosomes, the genetic marker of a male baby. We knew that didn't belong to the mom, and it didn't seem to belong to the current fetus." said Dr. Diana W. Bianchi, chief of perinatal genetics at Boston's New England Medical Center.

Thinking it could be a lab mistake, the researchers looked again, this time drawing blood from women who previously.had carried boys but who now were pregnant with girls.

All four women carried fetal cells with Y chromosomes.

Then they looked at eight mothers who were not pregnant but who had given birth to a son in the past three decades. Six of the eight carried fetal cells with a Y chromosome. One of the women had delivered her last boy 27 years ago.

"As a working mother who travels quite a bit it's comforting to me to know that I carry my children with me," Bianchi said with a laugh.

The cells they found are immature white blood cells of the male babies, though Bianchi is sure the cells of female babies also are left behind.

"It's just much easier~to track the Y chromosomes she said

Female cells occur in very small numbers in the mother's bloodstream and must be sorted with with several techniques to be isolated for study.

"It's literally like looking for needle in a haystack," Evans said.
If the proposed blood test for fetal genetic defects can be perfected, the technique would I'd safer than amniocentesis which involves piercing the uterus with a large needle. Amniocentesis can cause miscarriages about once in very 200 tests.

"If we can get this to work, you could get the same answers that we get with an invasive test," Evans said.