Litigation Activate: Ultrasound Edition

Yikes. You just can't win with embryos:

Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice, the team noticed that certain neurons in the growing cortex were not behaving normally.

Rakic discussed his preliminary results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2004...But he says he wanted more results to be convinced -- now, 335 mice later, he is.

Rakic says that he has no evidence that ultrasound scanning disrupts the brains of human fetuses. The affected mice in his study were exposed to continuous ultrasound for 30 minutes or more; a baby's brain would be exposed for only a fraction of this time during a 30-minute scan of its entire body. And a narrow ultrasound beam will hit and affect far more of a small mouse brain than a larger human one.

Some studies have hinted that ultrasound causes subtle brain changes in humans that increases the chance of a child being left-handed or developing speech problems. Others suggest that the risk is minimal. A 2004 study found that fetuses exposed to five ultrasound sessions rather than one are more likely to grow poorly, but that this difference disappears after the first year1.

"We don't want to push the panic button," Rakic says. "It would be very wrong if women stopped having medically indicated ultrasounds because of this."

Hear that rumbling noise? It is all the malpractice attorneys high-fiving one another.

Perhaps, I have a poor opinion of malpractice attorneys that is colored by the seventy bagillion ads I see for them everyday on the New York subway system -- many of them emphasizing the million dollar awards in large writing (and the fact that they were overturned on appeal in small writing).

I am not saying this research is wrong. Actually it wouldn't surprise me if it is right. I use a sonicator at the lab to disrupt protein samples, so I can't but think that zapping the hell out of cells with sound waves would do at least something. But in many cases -- and I would argue in nearly all pregnancies at least once -- ultrasound is necessary, and the benefits outweigh the costs.

It just makes me uncomfortable when I see research that I just know is going to be abused. It is like watching a toddler hobble towards the train tracks...you know that this just ain't going to be pretty.