Danish Down's study recommends changes
This article was originally published in Clinica
Executive Summary
Denmark could succeed in cutting the number of children born with Down's syndrome from an average of 65 to 15 per year if current guidelines were revised to introduce serum screening and nuchal translucency ultrasound. A recent study on screening for Down's syndrome in Denmark 1980-98 claims that current screening methods based on age as a basis for invasive prenatal diagnostics mean that for every case avoided, two healthy foetuses are aborted. This is because invasive techniques, in this case chorionic villus sampling (CVS) and amniocentesis (AC), carry an inherent risk of a 1% spontaneous abortion rate, says the report.