What to do if Down syndrome screening is high risk

Down syndrome screening can prevent birth defects and is an indispensable new item in prenatal examination. Children born with birth defects have a huge impact on the family. The resulting pressure is unimaginable, and most importantly, it causes great harm to the child's growth. Therefore, the impact of Down syndrome screening is extremely important. However, many mothers feel like the sky is falling and are at a loss when one of the test results in the Down syndrome screening is high. Then let’s take a look at the solution with the editor.

Down syndrome screening is based on extracting blood cells from pregnant women, testing the concentrations of alpha-fetoprotein, human gonadotropin and free estriol in the mother's blood cells, and combining the pregnant woman's date of delivery, weight, age, weight and gestational age at the time of blood sampling to calculate the risk of giving birth to a child with congenital idiocy with Down syndrome. Therefore, this test is indispensable when pregnant women are undergoing prenatal checkups. So what should you do if one item is high-risk?

1. The purpose of Down syndrome screening during pregnancy is to find out as soon as possible whether the fetus is likely to have Down syndrome. But please don’t worry too much. It is actually normal if there is a high risk in the Down syndrome screening.

2. If you are not at ease, you can undergo a minimally invasive prenatal genetic test, which is done by collecting peripheral blood (5 ml) from pregnant women, obtaining isolated DNA, using a new generation of high-throughput sequencing technology, and combining it with biological feature analysis to obtain the risk of the fetus suffering from sex chromosome aneuploidy (21-trisomy, also known as Down syndrome, 18-trisomy, 13-trisomy). This method is best used for on-site sampling in early and late pregnancy, and has the characteristics of minimally invasive sampling, no risk of miscarriage, high sensitivity, and high accuracy.

3. Amniocentesis is also a method that directly extracts the fetal blood cells from the pregnant woman's amniotic fluid to test the fetal sex chromosomes. Its accuracy is the gold standard for diagnosing chromosomal abnormalities in children. However, it often has the possibility of abdominal pain and a miscarriage rate of 1-2%, which is riskier than other tests.

The editor believes that after the above explanation, everyone has a solution. However, the editor would like to remind all mothers that no matter how healthy you are, if you find that one of the items in the Down syndrome screening is high-risk, you should do further testing. Do not take chances, otherwise it will cause greater harm to yourself and your children. Finally, the editor would like to wish all the mothers a happy New Year!