OBJECTIVE To investigate the performance of first-trimester screening for aneuploidies by including assessment of the fetal nasal bone in the combined test of maternal age, fetal nuchal translucency (NT) thickness, fetal heart rate (FHR) and serum free beta-human chorionic gonadotropin (beta-hCG) and pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A (PAPP-A). METHODS Screening by the combined test was pe...

Partial trisomy 2p is a rare but relatively well-defined syndrome with distinctive clinical features, including marked psychomotor delay, dysmorphic face, and congenital heart disease. The phenotype of trisomy 18p is variable, from normal appearance to moderate mental retardation. Most cases of trisomy 2p and trisomy 18p result from the inheritance of an unbalanced segregant from a balanced par...

Although long term survivors are well documented, infants with the autosomal trisomies 18 (Edwards syndrome) or 13 (Patau syndrome) usually die in the first few days or weeks of life. Accurate estimates of life expectancy are few, particularly in the case of trisomy 13. There have been six population surveys of survival in trisomy 18, comprising 430 unselected cases. In contrast there have been...

A prenatal diagnosis of ductal-dependent, complex congenital heart disease was made in a fetus with trisomy 18. The parents requested that the genetic diagnosis be excluded from all medical and surgical decision-making and that all life-prolonging therapies be made available to their infant. There was conflict among the medical team about what threshold of neonatal benefit could outweigh matern...

The ophthalmic histopathology is detailed in a case of trisomy 18 (Edwards's syndrome). In addition to the ocular pathology already reported, previously unreported findings of iris stromal hypoplasia, abnormal lens shape, and decreased ganglion cells in the retina are noted. The ophthalmic histopathology associated with this syndrome and the relationship of several genetic disorders to their oc...

The co-existence of a double chromosomal abnormality in one individual is a rare event, even more the simultaneous presence of Klinefelter (XXY) and Edwards (trisomy 18) syndrome. The aim of this article is to report the case of a newborn with a double aneuploidy, which consists in the coexistence of Edwards and Klinefelter syndrome. The patient's phenotype correlates mainly with Edwards syndro...

OBJECTIVE To re-evaluate in a larger cohort of patients if the maternal serum biochemical markers used in first trimester aneuploidy screening have the same marker distributions in pregnancies with a previous history of aneuploidy compared with those that have no previous history. METHODS Information related to previous pregnancy history is routinely recorded as part of first trimester screen...

We directly sequenced cell-free DNA with high-throughput shotgun sequencing technology from plasma of pregnant women, obtaining, on average, 5 million sequence tags per patient sample. This enabled us to measure the over- and underrepresentation of chromosomes from an aneuploid fetus. The sequencing approach is polymorphism-independent and therefore universally applicable for the noninvasive de...