The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine (SMFM) have issued new guidelines replacing previous guidance on prenatal genetic screening. The guidelines are restricted to subscribers and members. This post summarizes Practice Bulletin No. 226, offers brief commentary, and invites your thoughts on the new guidelines. Continue reading ACOG/SMFM Issue New Guidelines for Prenatal Genetic Screening
Changing the way labs bill for genetic tests?
It’s hard to imagine a more mind-numbingly boring topic than billing codes for medical tests … and yet those codes mean the difference between profit and loss to commercial labs, and often the difference between whether patients can get the tests that their providers recommend. Continue reading Changing the way labs bill for genetic tests?
Nuffield Council and BBC report spur change
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a UK-based group that issues carefully considered (though not legally binding) reports on bioethics issues, made a number of important recommendations regarding prenatal testing in its 2017 report, Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT). In a blog post nearly two years later, however, the Council expressed dismay that so little action had been taken to alleviate their concerns. Remarkably, that blog post and a troubling BBC report issued the same day have apparently led to some important changes in just a few months.
Continue reading Nuffield Council and BBC report spur change
No US commercial NIPS labs fully follow ACMG’s 2016 guidelines
None of the commercial laboratories that offer prenatal cell-free DNA screening (also known as non-invasive prenatal screening, or NIPS) in the United States follow all of the guidance from ACMG (the American College of Medical Genetics & Genomics). A new study published in Genetics in Medicine by a multidisciplinary group of experts assessed materials from all the US labs currently offering NIPS, and found a great deal of variability in their adherence to the 2016 ACMG guidelines.
In a press release, Brian Skotko, MD, of MassGeneral Hospital for Children, the paper’s lead author, noted, “It’s been more than two years since the ACMG published its recommendations about NIPS, and we could not find a single commercial lab in the U.S. that adhered to all of the recommendations.”
While multiple professional societies have issued recommendations for offering and returning results from NIPS, the 2016 ACMG recommendations were unique in providing guidance not only for health care providers, but also for laboratories marketing and conducting NIPS.
The authors of this just-published study included several of the experts who contributed to the 2016 ACMG recommendations, and also included several PIRC members with expertise in bioethics and patient/provider education. The table detailing the results is publicly available here on the PIRC website, and the group has pledged to update this table as new information is made available.
The original article (available to Genetics in Medicine subscribers) is available online:
Skotko BG, Allyse M, Bajaj K, Best BG, Klugman S, Leach M, Meredith S, Michie M, Stoll K, Gregg AR. Adherence of Cell-free DNA Noninvasive Prenatal Screens to ACMG Recommendations. Genetics in Medicine online advance publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41436-019-0485-2
Prenatal Information Research Consortium 