When science doesn't have all the answers

I've written about that experience. How an elevated blood test led us to a genetics counselling appointment where there was no counselling: no discussion about our values, what parenting meant to us, or how we felt about screening for and aborting a fetus with genetic disabilities. Other than a recounting of the dry statistics (that I had a 1 in 200 chance of having a child with Down syndrome and a 1 in 200 chance of miscarrying as a result of the amnio), there was no discussion at all.

When I couldn't make a decision, an obstetrician was sent in to berate me, referring to a child with Down syndrome as "a burden you'll live with for the rest of your life."

In a 2012 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the new microarray testing picked up the kind of genetic change my son has in six per cent of fetal samples with normal karyotypes from women who were referred when a structural problem was seen on ultrasound, and in 1.7 per cent of samples with normal karyotypes from mothers who were referred because they were older or had had a positive screening test.

Microarray currently requires fetal cells that are taken through amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling, so it comes with a risk of miscarriage.

But the researchers look to a non-invasive blood test being developed, with hopes that "every woman who wishes will be offered microarray, so that she can have as complete information as possible about her pregnancy," says lead investigator Dr. Ronald J. Wapner in a related news release. Dr. Wapner is professor and vice chairman for research at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia University Medical Center.

Who can argue with complete information?

But is it complete?

What kind of counselling is offered today to the parents of a fetus that is diagnosed with a micro-deletion or micro-duplication? Even less is known about some of these conditions because they're just being named.

Is a medical description of the condition paired with information from families raising children with the same disorder? Or affected adults?

In my son's condition, there's huge variation in how children are affected and microarray can't predict whether the symptoms will be mild or severe. And what about the human side of the equation, the joy that a child, regardless of ability, brings to a family. That can't be conveyed by a professional who has no firsthand experience with disability, and may well view disability as a medical failure.

"Women often terminate a pregnancy without knowing what life would be like with and for an anomalous child," writes Far From The Tree author Andrew Solomon in this New Yorker piece. "It is worth publicizing the satisfaction that the experience may entail, so that the pro-choice movement becomes the pro-informed-choice movement."

Parents-to-be often "confuse how it feels to lose an ability (to be suddenly bereft of hearing) with how it feels to live healthily with a variant body (to be deaf all your life)," he writes. "Further, they confuse their own discomfort with their child’s."

Yesterday one of our readers sent me a study called Posttraumatic growth in parents and pediatric patients in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. The study is a review of 26 journal papers on positive psychological change that results in parents or children after a child's traumatic medical event (including cancer, prematurity, and acquired and congenital disability).

"Posttraumatic growth is the positive psychological change that results from a struggle through a life-altering experience" and may include "greater appreciation of life, improved relationships, greater personal strength, recognition of new possibilities in one's life course, spiritual or religious growth, and reconstruction of a positive body image."

The authors conclude that posttraumatic growth is an important, little studied and poorly understood phenomenon affecting children with serious pediatric illness and their families. They suggest research is needed on how professionals can positively intervene "to facilitate families' movement away from dysfunction or deterioration and toward growth."

I include this paper because it demonstrates that traumatic experiences that shake up our worldview are not wholly negative. Life is more complicated than that.

The technical side of prenatal testing is the easy part. It's how we use that information to benefit families and the culture as a whole that's complex.

A paper on the use of microarray in prenatal diagnosis by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) raises some important points.

"The potential for complex results and detection of clinically uncertain findings identified by [microarray testing] can result in substantial patient anxiety," write the authors.

They note that women in the New England Journal of Medicine study who received abnormal results “reported a lack of good understanding of the potential for uncertain results and noted feeling great distress on receiving such information and then needing to decide how to proceed with the pregnancy.”

The ACOG recommends that women understand that prenatal microarray "will not identify all genetic disorders."

This is a point true of amniocentesis, but when I was counselled, no one ever explained it to me. My understanding was that a clear amnio result meant a genetically-intact child. After my son was born, I stopped counting the doctors who exclaimed, in disbelief: "But you had a normal amniocentesis!"

Further, the ACOG notes that "diseases may be identified for which the clinical presentation may vary greatly and range from mild to severe. It may not be possible to predict what the outcome will be in a given patient."

So how will identifying these problems prenatally help?

“We are way better able to counsel parents about what [development issues] would mean for the child," Dr. Wapner says in this CNN story. "We can modify the course and improve the outcome for the child.”

I hate to be cynical, but there aren't any fetal interventions that can improve my son's condition, or many of those I see on the list.

It would be useful to know what happened next in the cases of the women in the study whose fetus's received diagnoses. Did any of them benefit from fetal interventions that changed their outcome? Were the fetuses carried to term followed to see how they and their families fared? How many were terminated?

Oddly, the paper doesn't mention anything about termination.

How come there is no research on the "after" side of the prenatal-testing equation?

For example, how do parents rate the counselling they received? How could it be improved? Did parents feel equally supported by professionals in choosing to carry a child to term or terminate the child? What supports are provided to parents who terminate and what supports are provided to parents who don't?

We know that 85 per cent of women who receive a prenatal diagnosis for Down syndrome choose abortion.

Do they feel it's a choice, or a social responsibility?

This study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology looks at how people judge women who carry a baby with an identified disability to term or refuse prenatal testing.

The survey asked 281 staff at a Canadian university and 341 Canadian doctors who work in obstetrics to rate three scenarios in which a woman's child is born with a disability. Both the university community and the doctors rated the woman who chose not to abort her disabled fetus and the woman who refused prenatal testing as more responsible, more to blame, less deserving of sympathy, and less deserving of social and financial support for their child's care than a woman who wasn't offered testing.

"This examination is of pragmatic relevance because of a growing sentiment that prenatal testing can and should be used to meet public economic goals by reducing the financial burden that disability places on the medical and social welfare systems, and that women who do not use it to prevent the birth of a disabled child should be held financially or legally accountable," writes the author.

I'm grateful that microarray testing didn't exist when I was pregnant with my son. I didn't have the life experience to make an informed choice, and the genetic clinic didn't provide me with any family stories to give me a picture of what real life could be like. Most importantly, I couldn't predict my ability to cope with my son's disabilities and to parent a child who's different.

I believe the front-end of prenatal testing is proceeding at a pace way beyond our ability to understand its ramifications.

It's how we support families after the diagnosis that needs study.

Science must be used to our benefit, not just because the knowledge and technology exist.