NIPS SPIN

Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths. ~Edgar A. Shoaff

Every few years a new screening technology comes zooming down the prenatal pike, sometimes arriving more quickly than we might like. First there was maternal age, with the magical age of 35 as the cut-off. Low maternal serum AFP arrived in the 1980s and the OB community embraced it virtually overnight when ACOG’s Committee on Professional Liability issued a statement that practitioners could be held legally liable if they had not offered this screen to a patient who had given birth to a child with Down syndrome. This was followed in short order by the Triple Screen, The Quad Screen, nuchal thickening, Integrated Screening, etc., each one a statistical notch above its predecessor. The latest iteration – cell-free fetal DNA or Non-Invasive Prenatal Screening (NIPS) – stands head and shoulders above the rest. Two of our colleagues have already discussed the limitations and strengths of NIPS here on The DNA Exchange.*

NIPS is big, as in global big. One lab makes its brochure available in more 20 languages, from Afrikaans to Xhosa (the pregnancy gods...