High risk screening result - would Harmony be worth it?

[daftgeranium]

Hello all

If I come back with a high risk from combined screening next Wednesday (say 1:5 or greater, even 1:2) would it be worth taking the Harmony test as the next step instead of CVS?

ie if Harmony test comes back as 1:2, I would need to get CVS done to get a definitive answer anyway......? if you see what I mean.

Any opinions out there gratefully received. Thanks.

It depends on how happy you are about a) spending money and b) waiting longer for the results!

If money were no object, and you were worried about the small risk of loss and happy to wait 1-2 weeks, then doing Harmony would definitely still be worthwhile. After all if the baby does not have a trisomy, it will almost certainly come back at 1 in 10,000 i.e. low risk. The things that cause a positive screening for the NT scan (hormone levels in your blood, nuchal fold) are not the same things that cause a positive screening result for Harmony (free foetal DNA floating in your blood).

If you got a 1 in 2 Harmony result (high risk) then given the results of the NT screening looking so bad, it would be pretty likely that baby has an issue given two different methods are suggesting it is the case. It would be up to you and your views on termination/risk etc as to whether you wanted absolute confirmation via CVS or amnio.

On the other hand if the cost was a big issue and/or you felt you needed to know as soon as possible (and you are okay with the risks) then you may as well go straight to CVS.

Good luck with your screening! I was nearly in the same situation as you describe, except I had done Harmony before my NT screening so I already knew it was negative when I was told the NT screening would have put me at 1 in 5!

Agree with crispy, it partly comes down to how you would handle a 2 week wait for harmony results knowing you had a 1:2 result (say) from nuchal. I was in that position earlier in the year. I didn't handle it well, but then I'm a total stress-head. When my harmony came back positive I decided I wanted to have a termination but nhs don't allow it without 100% proof that baby had DS so I had to have the cvs to prove it. This all meant the uncertainty went on for longer, causing more distress. This time round I'm getting my harmony and combined results at the same time to avoid the dilemmas/waiting. Good luck for your results! xx

P.S. if you do decide to have cvs make sure you have it done with someone who does lots of them and can give you assurance that their miscarriage rates are lower than national average. Some are much better at it than others.

Its called NIFTY