Clinical management
from Section 2 - Fetal disease
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Introduction
Neonatal and pediatric tumors have a range of outcomes depending on the anatomical origin of the tumor, its malignant potential, and response to treatment. Significant advances in prenatal imaging such as high resolution ultrasound and ultrafast MRI have allowed us to more accurately diagnose these same tumors in utero. This increase in prenatal diagnostic capability has significant benefits for the parents, the fetus, and the perinatal team taking care of these patients. For the parents of a fetus diagnosed with a neoplastic process, it affords more comprehensive prenatal counseling so that parents know what to expect for the duration of the pregnancy and can help prepare them for the challenges that the baby will face in the perinatal period and beyond. For the fetus, prenatal diagnosis has allowed us to identify a subset of these babies that historically have had a very poor prognosis. These patients may benefit from an in-utero intervention that can potentially salvage the pregnancy. Lastly for the perinatal team, prenatal diagnosis helps identify those high-risk patients that will have significant issues in the perinatal period to ensure that the baby is delivered in the appropriate setting, at an optimal gestational age, and with advanced delivery techniques, such as the ex-utero intrapartum treatment (EXIT) procedure, to allow the best possible outcome for the sickest of these patients.
In this context, the goals of this chapter are to outline the prenatal imaging and clinical diagnoses, discuss the antenatal natural history, and review available treatment options during the pre- and postnatal period for fetuses with prenatally diagnosed tumors. As the histology of these tumors is only confirmed postnatally after resection, we have organized this chapter by anatomical site at prenatal diagnosis.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.