Clinical utility of noninvasive prenatal screening for expanded chromosome disease syndromes

To assess the clinical performance of an expanded noninvasive prenatal screening (NIPS) test ("NIPS-Plus") for detection of both aneuploidy and genome-wide microdeletion/microduplication syndromes (MMS).

A total of 94,085 women with a singleton pregnancy were prospectively enrolled in the study. The cell-free plasma DNA was directly sequenced without intermediate amplification and fetal abnormalities identified using an improved copy-number variation (CNV) calling algorithm.

A total of 1128 pregnancies (1.2%) were scored positive for clinically significant fetal chromosome abnormalities. This comprised 965 aneuploidies (1.026%) and 163 (0.174%) MMS. From follow-up tests, the positive predictive values (PPVs) for T21, T18, T13, rare trisomies, and sex chromosome aneuploidies were calculated as 95%, 82%, 46%, 29%, and 47%, respectively. For known MMS (n = 32), PPVs were 93% (DiGeorge), 68% (22q11.22 microduplication), 75% (Prader-Willi/Angleman), and 50% (Cri du Chat). For the remaining genome-wide MMS (n = 88), combined PPVs were 32% (CNVs ≥10 Mb) and 19% (CNVs <10 Mb).

NIPS-Plus yielded high PPVs for common aneuploidies and DiGeorge syndrome, and moderate PPVs for other MMS. Our results present compelling evidence that NIPS-Plus can be used as a first-tier pregnancy screening method to improve detection rates of clinically significant fetal chromosome abnormalities.