Pregnant women are increasingly facing unexpected findings about their own health from tests designed to screen their blood for fetal abnormalities. Some women have discovered, for instance, that they have a sex-chromosome abnormality, and for others tests have flagged the presence of a tumour, explains Diana Bianchi in a Comment piece in this week's Nature. "Patients, obstetricians and physicians have been taken by surprise," she writes.
The tests — available since 2011 — enable clinicians to look for chromosomal abnormalities in a fetus by sequencing DNA fragments floating in the mother's blood. However, consent forms for the tests "rarely mention the possibility of findings concerning the mother's health", and caregivers have little guidance on what to do when such findings arise.
Bianchi calls on commercial providers of the blood tests to revise their consent forms and urges professional societies, such as the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, to take the lead on educating parents and caregivers about incidental findings and how to handle them. Such findings could "accelerate treatments and save lives — rather than just increase the anxiety of thousands of pregnant women," Bianchi argues.