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Why Routine Pregnancy Ultrasound is Useless and May Be Harmful



 
 
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Old September 4th 03, 07:06 AM
Jenrose
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Default Why Routine Pregnancy Ultrasound is Useless and May Be Harmful

Just a note... Midwifery Today E-news is available free online at
www.midwiferytoday.com . Please include this attribution with any shameless
copying! (BTW... on general copyright issues... Midwifery Today encourages
people to share from E-News, we just like our web site addy to stay glued to
it... When articles are posted to our website other than in E-News, we
prefer people just link to the article, rather than copying. If it appears
in the magazine but not online, please paraphrase and attribute, rather than
copying.)

g

Jenrose
aka
Jennifer Rosenberg, Midwifery Today Design Editor

"Larry McMahan" wrote in message
...

Note the use of the word "routine." Ultrascound may be useful for

specific
indications. This article shamelessly copied from Midwifery Today E-News.

Happy reading,
Larry

4) Ultrasound in Pregnancy

Ultrasound: high-frequency sound waves that travel at 10 to 20 million

cycles
per second. The pattern of echo waves creates a picture of tissue and

bone.

In 1987, UK radiologist H.D. Meire, who had been performing pregnancy

scans
for 20 years, commented, "The casual observer might be forgiven for

wondering
why the medical profession is now involved in the wholesale examination of
pregnant patients with machines emanating vastly different powers of

energy
which is not proven to be harmless to obtain information which is not

proven
to be of any clinical value by operators who are not certified as

competent
to perform the operations" (1).

Routine prenatal ultrasound (RPU) actually detects only between 17 and 85
percent of the 1 in 50 babies who have major abnormalities at birth (2,3).

RPU can identify a low-lying placenta (placenta previa). However, 19 of 20
women who have placenta previa detected on an early scan will be

needlessly
worried: the placenta will effectively move up without causing problems at
the birth. Furthermore, detection of placenta previa by RPU has not been
found to be safer than detection in labor (4).

The American College of Obstetricians has concluded that "in a population

of
women with low-risk pregnancies, neither a reduction in perinatal

morbidity
and mortality nor a lower rate of unnecessary interventions can be

expected
from routine diagnostic ultrasound. Thus ultrasound should be performed

for
specific indications in low-risk pregnancy (5).

Effects of ultrasound include cavitation, a process wherein the small

pockets
of gas that exist within mammalian tissue vibrate and then collapse. In

this
situation "...temperatures of many thousands of degrees Celsius in the gas
create a wide range of chemical products, some of which are potentially
toxic. These violent processes may be produced by microsecond pulses of

the
kind which are used in medical diagnosis." (American Institute of

Ultrasound
Medicine Bioeffects Report 1988). The significance of cavitation in human
tissue is unknown. Studies have suggested that these effects are of real
concern in living tissues:
*Cell abnormalities caused by exposure to ultrasound were seen to persist

for
several generations (6).
*In newborn rats (similar stage of development as human fetuses at four to
five months in utero), ultrasound can damage the myelin that covers

nerves
(7).
*Exposing mice to dosages typical of obstetric ultrasound cased a 22%
reduction in the rate of cell division and doubling of the rate of

aptosis
(programmed cell death), in the cells of the small intestine (8).
*Two long-term randomized controlled trials comparing exposed and

unexposed
childrens' development at eight to nine years old found no measurable

effect
from ultrasound. However, the authors comment that intensities used today
are many times higher than there were in 1979 and 1981 (9).
====
EXCERPTED FROM "Ultrasound Scans: Cause for Concern," by Sarah Buckley,

MD,
Midwifery Today Issue 64, also published in Nexux, Oct-Nov 2002.

Excerpt references:

1. Meire, HB (1987). "The Safety of Diagnostic Ultrasound,"
British J of Ob Gyn 94: 1121-22.
2. Ewigman, BG et al. (1993). "Effect of Prenatal Ultrasound Screening on
Perinatal Outcome: RADIUS Study Group," New Eng J Med 329(12): 821-7.
3. Luck, CA (1992). "Value of Routine Ultrasound Scanning at 19 Weeks: a
Four-Year Study of 8849 Deliveries," Brit Med J 34(6840): 1474-8.
4. Saari-Kemppainen, A., et al. (1990). "Ultrasound Screening and

Perinatal
Mortality: Controlled Trial of Systematic One-Stage Screening in
Pregnancy. The Helsinki Ultrasound Trial," Lancet 336(8712): 387-89.
5. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) (August

1997).
Practice Patterns: Evidence-Based Guidelines for Clinical Issues in
Obstetrics and Gynecology. "Routine Ultrasound in Low-Risk Pregnancy."
No. 5.
6. Liebeskind, D. et al. (1979). "Diagnostic Ultrasound: Effects on the

DNAS
and Growth Patterns of Animal Cells," Radiology 131(1): 177-84.
7. Ellisman, MH et al.,(1987). "Diagnostic Levels of Ultrasound May

disrupt
Myelination," Exper Neur 98(1): 78-92.
8. Brennan P et al. (1999). "Shadow of Doubt," New Scientist 12:23.
9. Salvesen KA et al. (1999). "Ultrasound in Pregnancy and Subsequent
Childhood Non-Right-Handedness: A Meta-Analysis," Ultrasound Obstet
Gyn 13(4): 241-6.
====



 




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