Newborn screening varies from country to country

A study published in The British Medical Journal have advised that baby screenings without medical backing can cause more harm than good. Some national recommendations on whether to screen newborn babies for rare conditions do not assess the evidence on the key benefits and harms of screening.

Effective screenings can save lives and pick up on rare conditions, but decisions on which conditions to screen for vary from country to country despite similar healthcare systems and populations. It is unclear as to why these differences occur, but it has been suggested that the use of systematic reviews could play a part. Systematic reviews bring evidence from existing studies and use statistics to summarise the results and make evidence-based decisions.

A team of UK researchers conducted a study to assess whether use of a systematic review affects national decisions to screen for a range of conditions using the blood-spot test on new-born babies. This screening is offered to all babies to detect rare but serious health conditions.  It found that the use of systematic reviews were linked to a reduced probability of screening being recommended.

The authors of the study say, “This study showed that many national policy decisions about whether to screen for conditions are being made without systematically reviewing the evidence”…”Yet it remains essential to make evidence based policy decisions because once screening programmes are started they are difficult to stop.”

For more on this story see BMJ article here