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The first UK family who owe everything to embryo screening
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent2 Oct 2008
A couple have become one of the first in Britain to conceive their entire family through a genetic screening technique carried out at a London hospital.
Joanne and Adam Henry feared they would never be parents after doctors discovered Joanne had a gene defect.
Some of her chromosomes were in the wrong order, causing severe abnormalities in their first child Jasmine.
They were devastated when Jasmine died within minutes of her birth.
But experts at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital used a pioneering embryotesting technique to help conceive their healthy children Amy, five, and Harrison, who is just a few weeks old.
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis is used to assess the health and viability of embryos.
Doctors give patients fertility treatment then take a cell from the resulting embryos to test if they are "normal". The healthy embryo is implanted back into the mother's womb.
Mr and Mrs Henry, of Welwyn Garden City, are among only a handful of couples in Britain to have had more than one child using this method.
Mr Henry, 38, said his children would not be here without the help of Guy's. "We thought we would have to come to terms with not having children but now we have a life with two healthy children in it," said the company director-Amy was the only one of seven eggs produced by Mrs Henry, 35, which was of good enough quality to implant.
"This treatment is amazing because without it our children would not be here. It was horrible to have a loss like [Jasmine] so when Amy arrived it felt like a real sense of achievement. We even have a photograph of her as an embryo," Mr Henry added.
About one in 500 people are "silent" carriers of the same chromosome disorder as Mrs Henry. The condition only becomes obvious when they conceive children. It results in a late miscarriage or a child born with severe disabilities.
Under new laws, doctors can now make more use of PGD to create " disease free" embryos.
This includes screening embryos to eliminate genes which can increase the chance of developing cancer as well as diseases such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.
Mr and Mrs Henry were treated by Alison Lashwood at Guy's. Four couples at their fertility unit have become parents to more than one child over the past decade, thanks to PGD.
The fertility nurse told the Evening Standard: "We only use this procedure if we know the child is at risk of abnormalities. It was only because Mrs Henry's first baby was stillborn that we found out she was a carrier of a chromosome rearrangement.
"It is not a solution because a child could still be a carrier, but it spares parents the heartache of repeated miscarriage." Some experts have raised concerns about the procedure because doctors have to discard the "abnormal" embryos.
But Mr Henry said: "The whole process was very gruelling and we didn't know if we could go through it all again - we had been through so much already, especially with losing Jasmine. I'm annoyed people saying, 'Is this ethically correct?' No one is trying to clone a child. We are just two normal people who lost a baby."
