Negotiating Awareness: Dutch Midwives' Experiences of Noninvasive Prenatal Screening Counseling.

BACKGROUND: Discussion of the topic of noninvasive prenatal screening (NIPS) has become a standard part of Dutch maternity care practice. This means that pregnant women who are contemplating NIPS can receive counseling from their midwife or obstetrician. The aim of this study is to understand the communicative practices and decision-making principles regarding first-tier use of NIPS, as experienced by Dutch midwives. METHODS: Qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with Dutch midwives (n = 10) exploring their conversations about NIPS counseling and decision making. RESULTS: Midwives value the autonomy of women in decisions on NIPS. They consider it a midwifery task to assess women's awareness of the risks and implications of using or not using this mode of screening. The optimal level of awareness may differ between women and midwives, creating novel challenges for informed decision making in midwifery communication. KEY CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Negotiating awareness about NIPS in individual women is a relatively new and complex midwifery task in need of counseling time and skill. NIPS practices call for a reflection on midwifery values in the context of integrated maternity care.

Leaning towards Cytomegalovirus serological screening in pregnancy to prevent congenital infection: a cost-effectiveness perspective.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the cost-effectiveness of prenatal detection of congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) following maternal primary infection in the first trimester within standard pregnancy follow-up or involving population-based screening (serological testing at 7 and 12 weeks of gestation), with or without secondary prevention (valaciclovir) in maternal CMV primary infection. DESIGN: Cost-effectiveness study from the perspective of the French national health insurance system. SETTING: Cost-effectiveness based on previously published probability estimates and associated plausible ranges hypothetical population of 1,000,000 pregnant women. POPULATION: Hypothetical population of 1,000,000 pregnant women. METHODS: Cost-effectiveness of detecting fetal cCMV in terms of the total direct medical costs involved and associated expected outcomes. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Detection rates and clinical outcomes at birth. RESULTS: Moving to a population-based approach for targeting fetal CMV infections would generate high monetary and organizational costs while increasing detection rates from 15% to 94%. This resource allocation would help implementing horizontal equity according to which individuals with similar medical needs should be treated equally. Secondary prevention with valaciclovir had a significant effect on maternal-fetal CMV transmission and clinical outcomes in newborns, with a 58% decrease of severely infected newborns for a 3.5% additional total costs. Accounting for women decision-making (amniocentesis uptake and termination of pregnancy in severe cases) did not impact the cost-effectiveness results. CONCLUSIONS: These findings could fuel thinking on the opportunity of developing clinical guidelines to rule identification of cCMV infection and administration of in-utero treatment. These findings could fuel the development of clinical guidelines on the identification of congenital CMV infection and the administration of treatment in utero. TWEETABLE ABSTRACT: CMV serological screening followed by valaciclovir prevention may prevent 58% to 71% of severe cCMV cases for 38 € per pregnancy.

First trimester screening cut-offs for noninvasive prenatal testing as a contingent screen: Balancing detection and screen-positive rates for trisomy 21.

OBJECTIVE: To provide data on how screen-positive and detection rates of first trimester prenatal screening for fetal Down syndrome vary with changes in the risk cut-off and maternal age to inform contingency criteria for publicly funded noninvasive prenatal testing. MATERIALS AND METHODS: First trimester screening and diagnostic data were collected for all women attending for first trimester fetal aneuploidy screening in Western Australia between 2005 and 2009. Prenatal screening and diagnostic data were linked to pregnancy outcomes, including data from the Midwives' Notification System and the Western Australian Registry of Developmental Anomalies. The prevalence of Down syndrome and performance of screening by risk cut-off and/or for women >35 years were analysed. RESULTS: The current screening risk cut-off of 1:300 has screen-positive and detection rates of 3.5% and 82%. The screen-positive rate increases by 0.7-0.8% for each 100 point change in risk, up to 19.2% at 1:2500 (96% detection rate). Including all women >35 years as screen positive would increase the screen-positive rate and detection rates to 30.2% and 97.2%. CONCLUSION: Variation in screening risk cut-off and the use of maternal age to assess eligibility for noninvasive testing could significantly impact the demand for, and cost of, the test. A contingent first trimester screening approach for risk assessment is superior to the use of a combination of screening and maternal age alone. These data will inform decisions regarding the criteria used to determine eligibility for publicly funded noninvasive prenatal testing.

A Study on The Incidence of Neural Tube Defects in A Tertiary Care Hospital Over A Period of Five Years.

INTRODUCTION: Several congenital malformations affect developing fetuses, among which Neural tube defect (NTD) is most common. Folic acid supplementation brought decline in the incidence of NTDs. The present study aims at finding the incidence of NTDs in a tertiary care hospital and compares the results with the similar Indian studies published earlier. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study was done at Chettinad Hospital & Research Institute (CHRI), Kelambakkam. The total number of deliveries was recorded for a period of five years from 2009 to 2013. Fetuses which were still born with neural defect were collected and observed in detail externally for the sex, type of NTD and other associated anomalies. Indian studies published between 1987 and 2014 reporting the incidence of NTDs among the births occurred were retrieved from the Internet and their various observations were used for comparison. RESULTS: The number of deliveries conducted between 2009 and 2013 at CHRI was 3220. Of these, babies born with NTDs were nine (5 males and 4 females). The incidence of fetuses with meroanencephaly, holoanencephaly, craniorachischisis, encephalocele and myelocele were 0.62, 0.62, 0.93, 0.31 and 0.31 per 1000 births respectively. Overall incidence of NTDs in the present study was 2.79/1000 births. Fetuses with NTDs also had the following anomalies - Club foot, cleft lip and palate and exomphalos. CONCLUSION: Comparing the results with the previous studies it is clearly evident that the incidence of NTDs have significantly reduced from 11.42/1000 births to 2.79/1000 births. In most of the previous studies NTDs had a female preponderance whereas present study has a male preponderance.In older studies, spina bifida was the most common NTDs followed by anencephaly. But in the present study anencephaly was the common NTD than spina bifida. Incidence of NTDs has reduced due to various reasons like prenatal screening for fetal anomalies and folic acid supplementation.

A new ethical landscape of prenatal testing: individualizing choice to serve autonomy and promote public health: a radical proposal.

A new landscape of prenatal testing (PNT) is presently developing, including new techniques for risk-reducing, non-invasive sampling of foetal DNA and drastically enhanced possibilities of what may be rapidly and precisely analysed, surrounded by a growing commercial genetic testing industry and a general trend of individualization in healthcare policies. This article applies a set of established ethical notions from past debates on PNT for analysing PNT screening-programmes in this new situation. While some basic challenges of PNT stay untouched, the new development supports a radical individualization of how PNT screening is organized. This reformation is, at the same time, difficult to reconcile with responsible spending of resources in a publicly funded healthcare context. Thus, while the ethical imperative of individualization holds and applies to PNT, the new landscape of PNT provides reasons to start rolling back the type of mass-screening programmes currently established in many countries. Instead, more limited offers are suggested, based on considerations of severity of conditions and optimized to simultaneously serve reproductive autonomy and public health within an acceptable frame of priorities. The new landscape of PNT furthermore underscores the ethical importance of supporting and including people with disabilities. For the very same reason, no ban on what may be analysed using PNT in the new landscape should be applied, although private offers must, of course, conform to strict requirements of respecting reproductive autonomy and what that means in terms of counselling.

Prenatal screening: an ethical agenda for the near future.

Prenatal screening for foetal abnormalities such as Down's syndrome differs from other forms of population screening in that the usual aim of achieving health gains through treatment or prevention does not seem to apply. This type of screening leads to no other options but the choice between continuing or terminating the pregnancy and can only be morally justified if its aim is to provide meaningful options for reproductive choice to pregnant women and their partners. However, this aim should not be understood as maximizing reproductive choice per se. Only if understood as allowing prospective parents to avoid suffering related to living with (a child with) serious disorders and handicaps can prenatal screening be a publicly or collectively funded programme. The alternative of moving prenatal testing outside the healthcare system into the private sector is problematic, as it makes these tests accessible only to those who can afford to pay for it. New developments in prenatal screening will have to be assessed in terms of whether and to what extent they either contribute to or undermine the stated aim of providing meaningful options for reproductive choice. In the light of this criterion, this article discusses the introduction of the new non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT), the tendency to widen the scope of follow-up testing, as well as the possible future scenarios of genome-wide screening and 'prenatal personalised medicine'. The article ends with recommendations for further debate, research and analysis.

Are midwifery clients in Ontario making informed choices about prenatal screening?

BACKGROUND: Informed choice is often lacking in women's decisions about prenatal screening. AIM: The aim of this study is to evaluate how well midwives in Ontario, Canada are facilitating informed choice in this area. METHODS: An Internet-based survey was used to investigate 171 midwifery clients' knowledge, attitude towards and experience of prenatal genetic screening tests, and to determine the proportion of study participants who made an informed choice about prenatal screening. FINDINGS: All participants demonstrated adequate knowledge of prenatal screening. The vast majority (93.0%) of participants made an informed choice. Participants who chose to screen had lower knowledge scores than those who opted out of screening. Client satisfaction rates in regard to care received in this area ranged from 97% to 100%. CONCLUSIONS: Results of this study suggest that Ontario midwives are effective in conveying information on prenatal genetic screening, contributing to high levels of client knowledge and satisfaction in comparison to similar studies in other jurisdictions.