Starting in 2021, as part of the ScreenPlus newborn screening pilot program, parents at select New York state hospitals will be given the option to have their newborns screened for 14 additional disorders. One of these disorders is metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD). Each of the 14 disorders that make up the ScreenPlus panel are all extremely rare, and include MPS-II, MPS-IIIB, MPS-IVA, MPS-VI, MPS-VII, GM1-gangliosidosis, CLN-2, NP-A/B, NP-C, Gaucher, Fabry, LAL-D, CTX, and MLD.
This pilot study is spearheaded by Melissa Wasserstein, MD, Chief of Pediatric Genetic Medicine at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore. The rollout of ScreenPlus will occur incrementally. Operations are scheduled to start up at Jack D. Weiler Hospital in the Bronx. Eventually, a total of 8 New York hospitals will offer the panel of 14 rare disorders to parents for 175,000 ethnically diverse newborns. The screenings will be conducted at New York State’s Department of Health Newborn Screening laboratory at the Wadsworth Center.
The overarching goal of ScreenPlus is to evaluate how well newborn screening works for these disorders. The data will also help determine how early detection through newborn screening affects the outcome of children diagnosed with these rare disorders.
Newborns who participate in ScreenPlus will continue being tested for the standard 50+ diseases already on New York’s routine newborn screening panel.
Be sure to visit the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s website to learn more about ScreenPlus: A Comprehensive, Flexible, Multi-Disorder Newborn Screening Program. You can also find more information about newborn screening in New York on our website here, and visit our helpful newborn screening map which shows which states are screening for which leukodystrophies and lysosomal storage disorders.
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