Question
What precautions should a woman with O-type blood and a man with AB-type blood take during pregnancy?
Answer
Doctor: Hello! We’ve been married for nearly four years, and for the past two years before our marriage, we hadn’t planned on having children. Now, both of us are thirty years old. In early 2004, my wife became pregnant, but she miscarried at around two months. When we went to the hospital to check, the doctor said to wait until we were pregnant again and to check then, as the situations with each pregnancy were different, and it would take a year before we could try again. In July 2005, my wife became pregnant again, and we were very careful to go to the hospital for a check-up. The doctor only did a urine routine test, confirming the pregnancy, and mentioned some precautions for pregnancy. We wanted to ask more questions, but the doctor was quite impatient and said everything was fine. Hello: Neonatal hemolytic disease occurs due to incompatibility between the mother and baby’s blood types, where the mother’s blood type antibodies pass through the placenta to cause destruction of the fetus or newborn’s red blood cells. There are 26 blood type systems in humans, although multiple systems can lead to neonatal hemolytic disease, the most common being incompatibility between the RH and ABO blood type systems. Statistics from Shanghai show that over 18 years, a total of 835 cases of neonatal hemolytic disease were diagnosed, with ABO incompatibility accounting for 85.3%, and Rh incompatibility accounting for 14.6%. Among hemolytic diseases caused by maternal-fetal blood type incompatibility, ABO incompatibility is the most common, primarily occurring when the mother is O-type and the fetus is A-type or B-type. Since O-type women naturally have IgG antibodies against A and B, while A-type or B-type mothers naturally have IgM antibodies, neonatal hemolytic disease can occur in the first child. ABO incompatibility hemolytic disease…