It is a known fact that not all pregnancies are carried to term and having a nonviable pregnancy is something devastating for a woman. This is why there was a panel of specialists gathered to come up with new criteria for ultrasonography to find the nonviable pregnancies in time.
Importance of the Panel
The main point of the panel is to make sure that the health care specialists don’t do any harm to the baby by performing unnecessary tests. In the moment when a doctor tells a woman that her pregnancy is nonviable, she would like to make sure of the diagnosis. The panel will come up with different kinds of recommendations which will help them in making decisions.
Key Points of the Decisions
Until this point a pregnancy has been considered nonviable in case the doctor didn’t find a heartbeat during an ultrasound when the embryo was already 5 millimeters long. According to the new standards the embryo should be of at least 7 millimeters for the doctors to be able to consider it nonviable.
Gestational Sac
The doctors can also say about a pregnancy that it is nonviable if there is an embryonic sac of 16-25 millimeters without an embryo in it. Until this point the threshold has been smaller and thus more pregnancies have been considered nonviable and it is possible that some of those pregnancies could have come to term.
Discriminatory Level
For sure you know that pregnant women need different blood test to determine their hormone levels. In some cases if the hormone levels weren’t high enough, the pregnancy has been considered nonviable automatically.
Cautions
The panel of specialists advises doctors not to do anything that could harm the baby solely based on the results of a blood test. This is especially important in case of women who have inconclusive ultrasound results.
Technical Development
Due to the advancements made in the field of technology, doctors are able to see details of a pregnancy that were unknown before. The goal of the panel is to find a consensus between the findings of the ultrasound and the amount of time that women have to wait for in order to find out whether the results that they have are conclusive or not.
It is important not to “label†a pregnancy as being nonviable at an early stage. There should be no rush to diagnose a miscarriage just to avoid a misdiagnosis.
