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Newborn screening for cystic fibrosis: evidence for benefit
Correspondence to:
Dr Ian M Balfour-Lynn, Royal Brompton Hospital, Sydney Street, London SW3 6NP, UK; i.balfourlynn@ic.ac.uk
Accepted 19 June 2007
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Every year our centre is referred children with cystic fibrosis (CF) whose diagnosis has been unnecessarily delayed, having been missed by a number of health professionals. Sometimes the diagnosis is fairly obvious, for example the child has a classic history of frequent chest symptoms, but the loose stools have been put down to frequent courses of antibiotics. Some of these children have irreversible changes and we have even seen bronchiectasis, finger clubbing and mucoid Pseudomonas aeruginosa at presentation. Almost all of these children would have benefited from newborn screening (NBS). Currently, the median age at diagnosis in the UK is 1 month for screened babies and 6 months for those clinically diagnosed (excluding meconium ileus),1 while in the USA it is 2 weeks and 14
months, respectively.2
There has been a struggle for CF NBS to gain acceptance. Most supportive evidence comes from the randomised controlled trial in the Wisconsin
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Screening (epidemiology)
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Screening (public health)
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Research and publication ethics
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Cystic fibrosis
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Pancreas and biliary tract
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