Prenatal Screening for High Risk Pregnancies

Prenatal care, a very important indicator of medical care, is the fundamental work in maternal and child health. A prenatal screening project was designed to detect high risk pregnancies by the researchers and 5,824 pregnant women’s data from National Taiwan University Hospital for the years 1992-1994 was analyzed. The data collected included: maternal age, the willingness to undergo amniocentesis, mean corpuscular volume (MCV) for thalassemia carriers screen-ing, hepatitis B carriers screening, rubella and syphilis screening. The results showed that among the pregnant women, 1270(21.9%) were more than 34 years old, and 597 (68.7%) of the advanced maternal ages agreed to undergo amnio-centesis, among these, 412 (69%) women actually underwent amniocentesis, and 10 chromosomal anomaly were detected. Of all women, 18 (0.3%) had been infected by syphilis, among 335 women who sought for rubella screening, 220 (65.7%)did not have protective rubella antibody. The prenatal screening project had provided a better quality of services to the women who chose to have antenatal care in this hospital, early identifying detectable congenital defects and avoiding preventable congenital defect births had been reached.