Is karyotyping couples experiencing recurrent miscarriage worth the cost?

Abstract

Karyotyping couples that have had recurrent miscarriages detects balanced rearrangements in carrier parents who can be offered prenatal cytogenetic analysis to prevent the birth of a subsequent child with an unbalanced rearrangement. In four UK centres, over periods of 5-30 years, balanced rearrangements were found in 406 out of 20,432 parents that had experienced miscarriage (1.9%), but only four unbalanced rearrangements were found after referral for prenatal diagnosis because of a balanced parental translocation ascertained for recurrent miscarriages. At an estimated cost of 3-4 million pounds, these data raise doubts about the cost effectiveness of current policies on the routine karyotyping of couples experiencing repeated miscarriages.