AIBU to feel uneasy about the safety evidence for pregnancy ultrasounds?

Many countries do scans much more frequently. Where I am, you have one at every single appointment, so once a month until 30 weeks and then every two weeks until birth. If ultrasounds were causing an issue, surely we'd see a huge spike of something in these countries that use ultrasound technology so much more freely?

My brother clearly has ASD and no diagnosis. And that's not a wholly amateur opinion. No one was diagnosed back then. 'Skyrocketing diagnosis' is just a thing because people don't understand systems.

People have started threads about the increased diagnosis of neurodiversity. Those threads usually end up full of people saying that they can see the neurodiversity going back generations in their families. Neurodiversity isn’t a new thing, in some cases diagnosis is.

If there was any danger with ultrasound scans then DD and DS would have come out glowing green.

I had so many I lost counts due to pevious multiple miscarriages, bicornulate uterus with a septum, and potential heart problems that needed to checked regularly along with growth scans. I even went for private reassurance and 3D scans on top of all that!

Edited to add that it would be foolish to attempt to attribute DS's autism to the scans. As far back as our history goes he has had 'eccentric' ancestors, and diagnosed neurodiversity on both sides.

Or if you do make sure they're done by qualified sonographers!

Nothing in life is risk free. About 10% of the population is left handed and that hasn't changed for decades. It also tends to run in families which suggests a genetic component.

The vast majority of pregnant women have at least 2 ultrasounds during pregnancy. If you extrapolate that across the last 30/40 years, I'm pretty sure we'd be aware of any adverse effects by now.

The fact that you're reading up on this so heavily suggests a level of anxiety that is not healthy. Are you a new mum? Are you feeling anxious generally?

I had zillions of ultrasounds with my twins, OP, doppler etc, I'm an older mum & my mum had dozens of X-Rays for breech me before I was born!
The medical profession does the best it possibly can with the information available at the time.
Don't forget your hormones will still be all over the place.. I cried to my GP when AIDS was at it's most worrying & I'd seen on TV that newborns born to drug addicted AIDS carrying mums were left to die.. hugs.

"If there was actual harm it would be obvious at a population level"

Maybe it is - the rocketing number of diagnoses of neurodiversity maybe? Who knows. Maybe it's down to better methods of detection or maybe it has an external cause?

We simply don't know for sure one way or another.

I doubt very much that we do have "a lot more chronic conditions these days".
What we actually have is more research into conditions that hadn't been adequately identified and described 50 years ago, better diagnostic techniques, and better awareness among the general public (i.e. parents) that conditions exist and you don't have to just live with bad stuff.
As the sound waves in a scan have only one source, and have to travel through your body to get to the foetus it's virtually impossible that they could cause any damaging "thermal effects" that you would not have noticed yourself during the scan - The baby would have experienced a greater rise in temperature when you took a shower that morning.

Good god, I'm left handed. My brain must have been addled by all those ultrasounds in utero in the eighties! My mum thinks she had one very brief one with me, BTW. My dad and great grandmother are/were also left handed with... no ultrasounds.

This is a very silly thread.

Good question

You have a baby? (How old?) and you’re spending considerable time reading and worrying about this @Nc4dis … why?

It isn’t just poorer counties that have less scans though, most of Europe and the US have more routine scans than we do here.

Nothing is ever risk free though. It's amazing though people like yourself OP who clearly have no understanding of scientific studies, zooming in on quite absurd things and thinking that there's some unknown catastrophic danger from having these scans.

I had to get a VQ scan during pregnancy which involves radiation. The risks were clearly explained to me. I can imagine many people wouldn't take the risk of having one. The benefit was, it picked up i had a pulmonary embolism for which I was able to get treatment for.

How did you get to your scan appointment coincidentally? By car? If so that was probably the most riskiest part of your whole appointment.

My daughter was born prematurely by EMCS.

Without ultrasound scans, she'd have died in utero 🤷🏻‍♀️

Everything carries a risk. It's impossible to live an entirely risk free life.

What’s made you look into this? You can’t change the number of scans you had in pregnancy. If you’re experiencing anxiety and have a young baby, which happens to lots of us, please talk to someone.

There's also a lack of evidence showing whether there is danger to foetuses from women ingesting vitamin C in pregnancy. Does that make you worried about vitamin C, or does it make you think well of course not, because researchers couldn't ethically conduct a study where large amounts of pregnant women would exclude vitamin C and even if they could, they wouldn't find enough women stupid enough to go along with it?

You can never prove anything is 100% safe however many studies you do. The studies done don't seem to show any negative effects, but so many things happen in pregnancy and labour it would be practically impossible to say which specific action or inaction (or random occurrence like bleeding at some point) caused any particular (minor) problem with the baby.

They’re fine - everyone has them.
No one is having ultrasound on the very early stage bundles of cells so this study is irrelevant to you.
No one is having daily ultrasound.
Avoid 4D or vanity ones if you’re bothered, you only need the 12 week and 20 week scans in a normal pregnancy and the benefits of these clearly outweigh the risks.
I’m sure there’ll be more radiation from flying than from ultrasound?

Is this a joke?.

You’re basically saying “How do we know it’s not scans causing an uptick in chronic conditions, when we don’t have evidence it’s NOT?”

But by that same reasoning, you could just pick planes, or wifi signals, or vaccines as the cause - and plenty of people do, using the same logic.

The fact is, there is no good data suggesting a link between the increase in ultrasound scans and the increase in chronic conditions.

And there is plenty of data and understanding, actually, about the multi factorial causes that ARE influencing the increase in chronic conditions. It’s not some mystery that you need to find a random explanation for - actual
scientists are already all over it!

Im sympathetic to your anxiety but you are absolutely on the same path that leads to fixation on conspiracy theories.

Balance of risk isnt it, the absolutely miniscule 'risk' (hesitant to even call it that) is offset by the benefits of clinical ultrasounds. This is why its generally not recommend to get multiple scans just to see baby though, unless there is a clinical benefit then less reason to.

Why the antagonism?

This. More ultrasounds generally means something to monitor so of course is likely to more often have a baby or delivery with issues.

It's like the statistics about home birth some freebirthers take out of context. Homebirths may look safer because only the most routine births happen at home in the UK and approx 50% of planned homebirths end up transferring to hospital.

Obviously there is nothing wrong with being left handed! But it implies that the technology has the potential to do something in the brain, right?

How does it? I'm struggling to see the connection of being left handed and this being the result of technology "doing something to the brain"

Maybe instead of making up crack pot theories it would be more useful to actually look of data of the benefits of ultrasound scans and how important these have been in saving babies lives and picking up serious conditions for both mum and baby.