Diagnosis guidelines may be inadequate to help clinicians detect viable pregnancies thought to be miscarriages

Adapted from a news release issued by Wiley-Blackwell - Friday 14 October Current guidelines that help clinicians decide whether a woman has had a miscarriage are unreliable, possibly resulting in the inadvertent termination of wanted pregnancies, according to new research. The findings from three new studies at Imperial College London and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven show that a viable embryo may be present in some cases in which a miscarriage has been diagnosed. The research is published in the journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology . When a woman is suspected of having a miscarriage in the first trimester, common practice is to use ultrasound to measure the size of the gestational sac. If the sac is above a predefined size and no embryo is seen, a miscarriage is diagnosed and the woman may choose to have the pregnancy terminated. The first study shows that in some cases, cut-off values to define miscarriage in these circumstances cannot be relied upon. Furthermore, if there is doubt about the diagnosis, current guidance suggests that the sac should be re-measured 7 to 10 days later.