Informed Choice on Prenatal Down Syndrome Screening?

Prenatal Screening for Down Syndrome

Down syndrome ([DS] trisomy 21) is the most common cause of intellectual disability worldwide, affects approximately 1:500 pregnancies and is seen in 1:800 to 1:1,000 live births [1]. Down syndrome is the leading cause of prenatal chromosome abnormalities, accounting for 53% of all reported chromosome conditions. Genetic prenatal diagnosis (PD) for DS, since its introduction in the late 1960s, ...

12 Prenatal screening for Down syndrome

At the turn of the century, several Western countries introduced prenatal screening for Down syndrome. Technology became widely and easily available, and the combination of ultrasound and then blood tests made it possible to screen the entire pregnant population. For the first time in history, there was a chance of detecting, and eventually aborting, most instances of Down syndrome, and at rela...

Informed choice of pregnant women in prenatal screening tests for Down's syndrome.

BACKGROUND Although maternal serum screening (MSS) for Down's syndrome has become routinely available in most obstetric clinics in many countries, few studies have addressed the reasons why women agree to undergo the MSS test. OBJECTIVES The aims of this study were to describe the circumstances in which MSS was offered to pregnant women and their reasons for undertaking it. METHODS Particip...

Informed Choice in Screening

A) For health economists demand analysis seeks to identify which factors are most influential in determining how much care people are willing to purchase. That knowledge can be used to forecast demand more accurately and to predict changes in utilisation. The classical determinants of demand are incidence of illness and a set of cultural-demographic and economics factors. The assumption of cons...

Informed choice in cancer screening.