[Prenatal medicine: development, current status and future perspectives].
Prenatal diagnosis and therapy are based mainly on the progress of diagnostic ultrasound and laboratory methods in genetics. There is a general tendency to replace second trimester fetal diagnoses by first trimester approaches. Transvaginal sonography and chorionic villus sampling in particular have been proven helpful in this context. The aim of all prenatal diagnostic measures is fetal therapy in time to prevent untreatable abnormalities. There has been some progress in this area; in particular, the application of stem cells for the correction of single cell diseases seems to be promising. Because all prenatal interventions involve a risk to the mother and especially the fetus, there is a concentrated effort to develop non-invasive screening or diagnostic methods. Extensive work on the isolation of fetal cells from the maternal circulation has revealed that such cells are present physiologically in pregnancy, but further trials need to show whether this method is safe enough for routine diagnostic use.
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Universitäts-Frauenklinik Basel.
D015193:Chorionic Villi Sampling; D005260:Female; D005315:Fetal Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000628:therapy; D005821:Genetic Techniques; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D011247:Pregnancy; D011296:Prenatal Diagnosis / Q000379:methods*; D018570:Risk Assessment; D016216:Ultrasonography, Prenatal / Q000379:methods