Positive Screen for Krabbe Disease
If your child has just received a positive newborn screen for Krabbe Disease, call the Hunter’s Hope office at 716-667-1200 or email us at hope@huntershope.org and read our Krabbe NBS Family Guide.
If you are a medical professional caring for a child that has just received a positive newborn screen for Krabbe Disease, please see the Consensus guidelines for newborn screening, diagnosis and treatment of infantile Krabbe disease.
Newborn screening looks for enzyme levels that help detect the risk of specific diseases, but does not diagnose diseases. Additional testing is necessary to better understand why your baby received a positive screen. Just because your baby received a positive screen for Krabbe does not mean that he/she has the disease. It is possible that your child had a false positive, or that they are a carrier of the disease.
False Positive – The newborn screen is intentionally very sensitive so that no affected babies will be missed. Therefore, most babies who have a positive screen will not have the disease on confirmatory testing.
Carrier – Carriers of Krabbe never show any symptoms of the disease, but could potentially pass the gene onto their future children.
It is critical to determine if your child has the Early Infantile form of the disease, because there is a treatment option (cord blood transplant) only if the disease is caught in time.