text_1: This Blood Test Could Help Predict If A Pregnancy Is At Risk For Premature Labor
text_2: This BuzzFeed News story reports on early-stage research into an experimental blood test that aims to predict whether or not a pregnancy is at risk for premature birth. To determine that risk, the test looks for specific pieces of RNA generated by the baby that migrate into a mother’s bloodstream and which are associated with preterm deliveries. The story offers a short, readable, un-hyped, and eminently useful summary of the research, and it offers several comparisons to the standard alternative, which is an ultrasound scan. The story would have benefited from an outside expert weighing on the study and its potential ramifications and — more importantly — the potential harms of a false-positive test, which are not insignificant. According to the CDC, preterm birth affects about one in every 10 infants born in the US. Significant advances to lower preterm birth rates are certainly newsworthy–but this is an idea that’s been tested and failed before (see novelty, below) and readers need to know that.