Down Syndrome...to Test or Not to Test

Time flies. I know, it’s a cliché. But it’s true. It seems like just a couple of months ago I was bringing my baby girl home from the hospital and now she’s a bright, active, talkative 3-year-old. When a friend with a new baby asks a question about what her 3-month-old is doing, I have a hard time remembering what the Punkin did at that age. This should still be fresh in my memory! But, no, it was three years ago. A thousand days have passed and with them a thousand new stories have come and gone.

My child continues to grow and somehow along the way, I continue to grow older, too. I am now 36 and pregnant. How did this happen? Wait before you answer that…I know exactly how the pregnancy happened, it’s the 36 that I’m questioning.

The doctors have a term for being over 35 and pregnant. It’s called Advanced Maternal Age. Yeah… I guess it’s better than “knocked up old lady” or “antique stove with a bun in the oven” or…well, you get the idea. I’m above the average age for a preggo.

With Advanced Maternal Age come a whole slew of potential complications. But perhaps the one everyone thinks of when you’re over 35 is Down Syndrome. Of all the things I worried about when I was pregnant with the Punkin and any worries that I had started to consider with this pregnancy, Down Syndrome was not even on the list until the doctor mentioned that as a woman over 35 I was in the target group for screenings.

I like to think that I’m not a big worrier. I just worry about the wrong things, like whether or not I locked the door or left the oven on. And although I wasn’t overly worried about the possibility of Down Syndrome, I did elect to have the first trimester screening. I didn’t invest a lot of energy in worrying about it, but I rationalized that if we have the medical technology available to get an answer early on, it was one more thing I could cross off my list of possible worries. That would free up time to try and remember whether or not my curling iron is still on.

Part of the reason I elected to get the first trimester screening is because it’s non-invasive. Once upon a time, the only way you could get this information was through an amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling. Both of these procedures involve sticking a needling through your abdomen into your uterus. No thank you. Not unless absolutely necessary.

But this screening is completely non-invasive from the baby’s point of view. The nurse drew some blood from me, but that was as invasive as it got. They also did an ultrasound to check nuchal translucency – or how thick the tissue is at the back of the fetus’ neck. Then they put the results together from these two tests and come up with a risk factor.

This is not the same as a diagnostic test. Only the aforementioned amniocentesis or CVS can tell you one way or another for certain whether your child has a chromosomal disorder or not. The results from the first trimester screen simply slide you up or down on the risk scale. A good result would mean I could move from a 1 in 200 chance (the average chance for a 36 year old) to, say, a 1 in 1,000 chance. A not-so-good result could move me to, for example, a 1 in 50 chance. While not entirely foolproof, it has a 90 to 95 percent accuracy rate. I’m comfortable with that.

So, when will we hear the results? The blood test won’t come back for about a week, so we won’t know the official answer until then. But the doctor said the ultrasound measurements looked perfectly normal. I’ll let you know when we hear back with the final results.