Antenatal care seems to be a significant contributor to low birth weight (LBW) babies, preterm birth, obstetric complications, and neonatal mortality. Widespread apply of prenatal care is often related to high-risk pregnancies; though the effects of prenatal care on unpleasant pregnancy outcomes in such pregnancies have not been widely discovered. Suitable prenatal screening and counseling are ...

In this issue of ecp, Evidence Matters focuses on obstetric care and how it might be done more efficiently. The goal of prenatal care is to ensure delivery of a healthy baby to a healthy mother. The standard regimen of care that most obstetric providers have been trained to use is intense—14 visits during a 40-week pregnancy and a myriad of screening tests. Many recommended aspects of prenatal ...

Antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiated on a prenatal basis in HIV-infected pregnant women is a highly effective method for preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission. We developed a decision analytic model to project the clinical and economic outcomes of alternative HIV screening strategies (voluntary prenatal screening [VPS], routine prenatal screening [RPS], and mandatory newborn screening [...

The United Kingdom National Screening Committee recently reviewed the evidence for prenatal and neonatal screening for toxoplasma infection and concluded that there was insufficient evidence to recommend screening in the United Kingdom. This issue will need to be revisited as new information or treatments become available. In this paper, the extent to which the research evidence on toxoplasma i...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate health professionals' opinions toward offering noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) as first-tier screening test regardless of pregnant women's risk, and toward a potential broader range of disorders. METHODS A questionnaire completed by obstetric health professionals (n = 240) after an in-service NIPT training in the West and North of the Net...

OBJECTIVES To determine what contribution prenatal ultrasound screening and neonatal pulse oximetry screening (POS) make to the timely diagnosis of neonatal coarctation of the aorta (CoA). METHODS We identified infants and fetuses diagnosed with isolated CoA in our referral area between 2003 and 2012 who died without surgery, underwent surgical repair before 2 months of age, or were terminate...

syndrome. In: Grudzinskas JG, Chard T, Chapman M, Cuckle HS, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (in press). 25 Laundon C, Spencer K, Macri JN, Buchanan P. Tumer syndrome detection by MSAFP/Free Beta (hCG) screening. J Med Genet 1993;30:340-1. 26 Spencer K, Mallard AS, Coombes EJ, Macri JN. Prenatal screening for trisomy 18 with free f3 human chorionic gonadotrophin. BMJ 1993 (in p...