Abstract
The Medical Screening Society provides a webpage where presentations given by members of the Society are accessible free of charge to both members and non-members. The presentations can cover different areas relating to preventive medicine, not only those related to medical screening. In drawing attention to this facility, there are four recent presentations by Professor Glenn Palomaki that have been uploaded onto the website.
Two were presented at the 19th International Conference on Prenatal Diagnosis and Therapy, one of these is titled ‘Alternative ways to implement non-invasive prenatal diagnostic testing: what are the implications?’ in which different screening options are presented against the criteria needed to assess screening protocols. The second of these two talks titled ‘Identifying and addressing gaps in knowledge relating to introducing cell free (cf)DNA testing into routine antenatal care’. This includes a description of the ‘DNAFirst’ project in which cfDNA analysis was carried out on 3500 pregnant women residing in Rhode Island. The third presentation in this series from Professor Palomaki titled ‘Prenatal screening for single gene disorders using large panels: a case for “Couple Screening”’ shows how couple screening is an efficient way for screening for several autosomal recessive disorders in combination. The fourth presentation titled ‘Population screening for BRCA’ is an elegant analysis of how BRCA mutation analysis can be used in screening for breast cancer, first identifying women with at least one Ashkenazi Jewish grandparent and then offer them the limited relatively inexpensive BRCA analysis appropriate for this group – a highly cost-effective way of identifying women at high risk of breast or ovarian cancer eligible for suitable preventive mastectomy and oophorectomy after the women have had all the children they want.
There are at present 41 presentations on the website. Medical Screening Society members are encouraged to submit their own presentations for consideration for uploading so they are more widely available. This is a useful advantage of Medical Screening Society membership. Membership details can be found here: http://www.medicalscreeningsociety.com