- Fetal Diagnosis and Therapy
- Kruckow S., Schelde P., Hatt L., Ravn K., Petersen O.B., Uldbjerg N., Vogel I., Singh R.
We present the first study that investigates the effect of ma- ternal body mass index (BMI) on the quantity of circulating fetal cells available to use in cell-based noninvasive prenatal test (cbNIPT). cbNIPT has been proposed as a superior alter-
native to noninvasive prenatal test from cell-free fetal DNA. Kølvraa et al. [Prenat Diagn. 2016 Dec;36(12):1127–34] es- tablished that cbNIPT can be performed on as few as one fetal cell, and Vestergaard et al. [Prenat Diagn. 2017 Nov; 37(11):1120–4] demonstrated that these fetal trophoblast cells could be used successfully in cbNIPT to detect chromo- somal and sub-chromosomal abnormalities. This study on 91 pregnant women with high-risk pregnancies suggests that cbNIPT should not be hampered by an increased BMI be- cause every pregnancy, irrespective of the BMI, has rendered
fetal cells for downstream genetic analysis. The mean num- ber of fetal cells per sample was 12.6, with a range of 1–43 cells in one sample. ANOVA showed that increasing mater- nal BMI tends to decrease the number of fetal cells, but not significantly.
