Noninvasive prenatal testing for fetal trisomies in a routinely screened first-trimester population

OBJECTIVE: We sought to assess performance of noninvasive prenatal testing for fetal trisomy in a routinely screened first-trimester pregnancy population. STUDY DESIGN: This was a cohort study of 2049 pregnant women undergoing routine screening for aneuploidies at 11-13 weeks' gestation. Plasma cell-free DNA analysis using chromosome-selective sequencing was used. Laboratory testing on a single plasma sample of 2 mL was carried out blindly and results were provided as risk score (%) for trisomies 21 and 18. RESULTS: Trisomy risk scores were given for 95.1% (1949 of 2049) of cases including all 8 with trisomy 21 and 2 of the 3 with trisomy 18. The trisomy risk score was >99% in the 8 cases of trisomy 21 and 2 of trisomy 18 and <1% in 99.9% (1937 of 1939) of euploid cases. CONCLUSION: Noninvasive prenatal testing using chromosome-selective sequencing in a routinely screened population identified trisomies 21 and 18 with a false-positive rate of 0.1%.