How to Prevent Tay-Sachs Disease

Tay-Sachs Disease is a fatal illness that can tear a family apart. Even under the best circumstances and care, most children diagnosed with this genetic condition rarely live past the age of four. Currently, there is no cure for Tay-Sachs and treatments do little but to delay the inevitable. While research is under way to find a cure, knowing how to prevent Tay-Sachs disease is the only recourse. Luckily, there are ways to prevent your child from inheriting Tay-Sachs from you and your mate.

Things You'll Need

• Blood Test

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Instructions

Prevent Tay-Sachs Disease

• 1

  Determine if both you and your mate are carriers of Tay-Sachs disease. For a child to inherit Tay-Sachs disease, both parents must be a carrier of the disease. If only one or neither of you is a carrier, then you can rest easy knowing your child will not have the disease.

• 2

  Perform a prenatal diagnosis to determine if the fetus has Tay-Sachs disease. A prenatal diagnosis by the method of chorionic villus sampling (CVS) can be performed after the tenth week of pregnancy to determine if the fetus has Tay-Sachs disease. The CVS method is the most popular method of prenatal diagnosis because it can be performed early in the pregnancy.

• 3

  Consider pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. This is a more expensive method of diagnosis and involves the process of in vitro fertilization to initiate the pregnancy. Before implanting the embryos they are tested for Tay-Sachs Disease. Only those embryos that are not carriers are implanted in the mother's womb.

• 4

  Choose your mate based upon whether or not they are a carrier of Tay-Sachs disease. Because Tay-Sachs disease requires both parents to be carriers, you can select a mate that is not a carrier of the disease. This may sound a little crass, but there are more people who are not carriers than are carriers, so the limitations are rather minor when considered against the seriousness of Tay-Sachs Disease.