Babies can look healthy at birth and still have health problems that need to be recognized and treated. For this reason your baby will have routine newborn screening tests done in the hospital before discharge. A few drops of blood will be taken from your baby’s heel and tested for a number of disorders. One of the tests performed is to detect problems with the immune system. If your baby had a result on this test that was either abnormal or did not give a clear result, additional testing needs to be done as soon as possible. The screening test alone cannot be used to make a diagnosis of Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID). You will receive instructions from your doctor about getting a new blood specimen without delay. In addition to SCID, the screening test also picks up other conditions associated with low T cells. These are often not as severe as SCID, but are important to find out so they can be addressed.
