Up to one in 23 women who have been told by doctors that they have miscarried are terminating a healthy pregnancy – because of a wrong ultrasound diagnosis.
Ultrasounds are ‘seeing’ a miscarriage when the pregnancy is still viable, a new study has discovered – and this is due to the guidelines in place for reading the scan, researchers from Imperial College London say.
According to their research – which included more than a thousand women who had bleeding and abdominal pain at around the sixth week of pregnancy – around four per cent of all ‘miscarriages’ diagnosed by ultrasound are, in fact, viable. However, all the women wrongly diagnosed would have been offered medication or surgery to ‘clear the uterus’, which suggests that many normal pregnancies may be ended unnecessarily.
The researchers reckon that 400 healthy pregnancies are being misdiagnosed every year in the UK alone.
(Source: Ultrasound in Obstetrics, 2011; doi: 10.1002/uog.10075).
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