The first bit of good news is that at her last midwife visit, Debs was told that she will be getting further additional monitoring because of her greatly advanced years. As well as the 12 week dating scan and the 18 week anomaly scan she will receive further growth monitoring ultrasound scans at 28 and 34 weeks. This is brilliant, especially with all our relatives in the prison colonies! We’ll be able to give everyone regular picture updates of Junior all the way through – so, keep your eyes peeled.
The second bit is that we were really surprised to get the initial blood results back on the 4th, which was way quicker than we’d expected. Lothian Health carries out the double test and we asked for the raw titer values and specific risk factors as well as the adjectival risk grading.
The raw results came back with titer values that are adjusted for weight but don’t seem to take in to account age, which must be burried in the translation to risk factor. But these values are :
Weight adjusted MOM for AFP – 1.2o
Weight adjusted MOM for hCG – 2.81
The interpretive results then put both Edward’s (trisonomy 18) and NTD (spina bifida) so far down the risk scale as to be effectively ruled out. The lab calculated risk factor for Down’s comes out as 1:12, which we need to understand the derivation of a bit better and also how this relates to other women of Deb’s age. From what little reading I have been able to do so far, trisonomy 21 seems, generally, to be associated with AFP values below 1.00, but we don’t know how age moves the baseline with respect to the (non age adjusted) overall mean. But that’s not the whole story so far.
We can also take in to account the (albeit informal) nuchal translucency examination, which has a detection rate of about 2 in 3; i.e. it leaves a risk of about 1:3 of a trisonomy 18 defect not being spotted. Combining these now puts us at a risk level of about 1:36, which is getting close to the level where we’re better giving amnio the body swerve. On top of all of that, the anolmaly scan at 18 weeks will give us another factor of 3 to 4. So if that comes out fine, which it will, then we’ll be far better without the risk of the amnio.
All in all, we’re pretty happy just now. Everything seems to be ticking along well, and there’s nothing that is giving us too much cause for concern.