Computer program for screening mothers of Down's syndrome

Park, Ile Kyu; Kang, Jung Oak; Yoo, Jin Woo; Lee, Seong Yun

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Since method for calculating the risk of Down's syndrome pregnancy using the mothers alphafetoprotein(AFP), chorionic gonadotropin(CG) and unconjugated Estriol(uE3) levels in serum was developed, many reports showed the method including triple markers was more effective than calculating the risk only by the mother's age. Authors developed a computer program which could calculate the risk conveniently. We compared it with the established program and explained the calculating logic used in the program to help the readers to make their own computer program.
METHODS
The risk of Down's syndrome pregnancy for age was calculated by the method of Cuckle, and medians of the CG, AFP, uE3 according to the days of pregnancy was calculated by Wald. Delphi(version 4.5, Inprise/Borland Corp., Scotts Valley CA, USA) was used as a programing language. We compared the risks of the pregnant women previously reported by the established computer program with those calculated by new computer program.
RESULTS
In this program, user put down patient's demographic information and the results of each tests and press the command button then the user can see the calculated risk in one screen. User can use newly calculated median value according to their own accumulated data. There were almost no differences in risks between the program and formerly established one.
CONCLUSIONS
The computer program developed by authors was agreed well with the established one, so this program could replace the latter. We hope there are many programs developed by readers in the future.