Advances in non-invasive prenatal tests are posing increasing ethical concerns for doctors, and raising parents’ anxiety levels, says a Brisbane maternal fetal medicine specialist.

Dr Joseph Thomas, of the Mater Health Service in Brisbane, says achieving proper informed consent is difficult with the latest screening tests owing to the complexity of the information doctors have to present to parents-to-be. 

Introduced in 2010, non-invasive prenatal tests based on the detection of cell-free fetal DNA in the maternal circulation, have provided a “revolutionary” detection rate of 99.7% for Down Syndrome with a 0.04% false positive rate, they said.

Since then, some centres have also begun offering extended panels of targeted conditions and low resolution whole genomic sequencing.