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Does Maternal Body Mass Index Affect the Quantity of Circulating Fetal Cells Available to Use for Cell-Based Noninvasive Prenatal Test in High-Risk Pregnancies?

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.