What the Experts Say About Fetal Fibronectin
You trust your doctor or nurse-midwife to do all he or she can to help bring your baby as close to term as possible. Hear what the experts are saying about fFN.
Fetal Fibronectin in Practice
Clinicians from throughout the country are discovering the benefits of fetal fibronectin. Here's what a few of them had to say about the test's usefulness, and how it compares to other methods of assessing preterm labor risk.
Kathryn Shaw, MD, is a perinatologist at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles. She finds fFN testing to be "far superior" to other methods of assessing the risk of preterm delivery.
Thomas A. Raskauskas, MD, of the North Shore Medical Center in Salem, Massachusetts, finds fFN testing to be "the best method to date" for assessing preterm delivery risk. He tests asymptomatic women with a history of preterm birth or other risk factors for PTB.
John M. Thorp, Jr, MD, is a perinatologist and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. The majority of his patients are high risk. Dr. Thorp relies on the high negative predictive value of a fFN test to avoid unnecessary treatment of preterm labor symptoms. He finds the test to be "superior to clinical judgment."
Dr. Thorp recalls a patient who was reluctant to become pregnant again due to preterm uterine activity in a previous pregnancy, and who did not want to be "sentenced" to bed rest again.
Daniel Eller, MD, uses fFN testing in his urban, maternal-fetal medicine practice in Atlanta, Georgia. He tests hospitalized patients with shortened cervices or symptoms of preterm labor and outpatients with shortened cervices or other risk factors for PTD. fFN helps him determine which patients need to be hospitalized and for how long. He says that a negative test result allows him to be less aggressive with tocolytics and hospitalization than he otherwise would be.
Dr. Eller's patients reap the benefits when they avoid weeks or even months of hospitalization by virtue of testing negative. Of one patient in particular, he says:
Patient testimonials
The views expressed in these testimonials are the opinions of physicians, and are not necessarily the opinions of Hologic, Inc., its officers, directors, and employees.