Prenatal genetic testing can both ease prospective parents' minds and increase their worries, NPR reports.
More companies are offering a broader array of prenatal genetic tests to a wider group of parents-to-be and, according to NPR, the prenatal genetic testing industry is poised to grow by 30 percent in the next few years.
It notes that some prospective parents may want all the information possible, while others might not. Additionally, NPR adds that parents and their physicians may need assistance making sense of their results. For instance, it says that when a couple and their doctor looked at their results, it appeared that their child was at an increased risk of spinal muscular atrophy, which led the prospective parent to panic. But when the couple, as their doctor suggested, sought out a genetic counselor, they found that while they were at an increased carrier risk, the risk of their baby having the disease was lower than they'd feared.
"There's the family that will want every possible test available," Meg Homeyer, a genetic counselor at Stanford, tells NPR. "They'll want no stone unturned because their tolerance for risk is low. There are other families where this information in pregnancy isn't useful for them."