Children born without immune systems respond better to treatment if the issue is detected early in life, before health problems appear.

Currently, 21 states offer the screening for this disease, which costs about $50 per test. A new study, published Jul. 30 in The New England Journal of Medicine, reports that early screening for newborns could literally mean the difference between life and death for some children.

The test looks for a disease known as severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). It is commonly referred to as the “bubble boy” disease, after a young man named David Vetter, who lived for 12 years in a plastic bubble inside his home in Texas. The disease renders the child incapable of fending off even the weakened viruses found in vaccines and has historically claimed the life of 100 percent of those diagnosed.

Those with SCID can undergo treatments that have been found to replace the immune system. Chemotherapy is used to destroy any part of the immune system the child might have and then bone marrow transplants are used to rebuild a healthy immune system.

A new type of treatment, using stem cells that form blood, has been shown to be very effective and this new study has determined that the earlier the child undergoes the procedure, the better the results. According to researchers, children under four months of age who are without any infections have a 90 percent chance of surviving the disease after undergoing the stem cell transplant.

Without treatment, many children do not live to see their first birthday.

Other studies have demonstrated that the screening process has allowed early interventions that have resulted in children living well into their 20’s.

One of the findings that researchers noted was that the earliest interventions did not require the stem cells to be a biological match. Despite assumptions that the cells could only come from closely related siblings, testing revealed that treatments in young infants with no infections were very successful. Not only did the stem cells not need to match, but the use of chemotherapy was often not necessary to successfully rebuild the immune system.