Control de calidad del cribado prenatal de aneuploidías. Control epidemiológico y control de calidad de la medición de la translucencia nucal: resultados de un hospital de tercer nivel durante un periodo de 3 años

Effective screening for Down syndrome can be provided in the first trimester of pregnancy. Quality assurance is an essential aspect of this first-trimester screening. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of first-trimester screening in our hospital from April 2010 through April 2013. We obtained an 84.21% detection rate for Down syndrome for a false positive rate of 2.66%. Subsequently, we evaluated the quality of our NT measurements by using the median nuchal translucency multiples of the median (MoM) and found systematic underestimation of NT. Only 30.4% of the sonographers reported median nuchal translucency MoM between 0.9 and 1.1. Our detection rate and false-positive rate were below the standards described by the Fetal Medicine Foundation. The cause was NT underestimation. Nevertheless, we observed a trend toward an improvement in the quality of NT measurements during the 3-year period. Our results are similar to those of other publications. The results of our study show the importance of quality assurance. Training and continual monitoring of data from individual sonographers are needed to ensure that measurements do not deviate.