If you are in your first trimester of pregnancy, your gynae should have provide you with the option of doing a screening of either OSCAR or NIPT.
OSCAR used a combination of maternal age, fetal NT and serum biochemistry to calculate the risk assessment result while Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) analyze the DNA using blood.
Both OSCAR and NIPT provide you with probability risk score, not the diagnosis result.
It is important to consider the decision if the result is 'High risk' first before even consider to choose OSCAR or NIPT. Because if the decision is to still proceed with pregnancy even if the result is 'High risk', then there is no point to do any of the test in the first place.
Why we choose NIPT over OSCAR?
1) Higher accuracy & lower false positive rate
It is critical regard to accuracy of the result because we are making a life and death decision based on the result.
As further test will take few days ~ weeks for the result to come back, can you imagine the mental and health stress during the waiting period will cause to the couple and their families members.
We also did our research and find out quite a numbers of their OSCAR result marked as 'High risk' but when they proceed to do further test like NIPT, the result turn out to be 'Low risk'.
2) Worth every cents
Although NIPT cost around 4 times more than OSCAR, but it worth every cents here.
In the most unfortunate ________ (fill in the blank) the baby have down syndrome (Trisomy 21) or have complicated health issues, the suffering the baby & the family have to undergo throughout the life and the medical expenses will bring to the family financial.
If you are willing to spend the kind of money to buy new mobile phone that can only last you for less than 3 years, your money will be better spend to do NIPT which may affect a few people for nearly 30 - 80 years, depending on their role.
This type of money we do not want to save for the short term that could haunt you back in the long term.
Make use of the advance technology this era have to lead a better quality life.
3) Discover the baby gender as early as 9 weeks
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