Soft Markers Found On Ultrasound

Stacy5454

Today I had an ultrasound at 18 weeks. Everything went fine during the ultrasound, but afterwards we were asked to stay and talk to the doctor. It turns out that the doctor found 2 soft markers on our ultrasound. One was a cyst in the babies brain. Apparently these can be indicators that your baby has down syndrome. My doctor said we could talk to a genetic counselor if we wanted, but she thought that the soft markers only increased our risk of having down syndrome to 1%. She said the only way we could know for sure that the baby had down syndrome was through amniocentesis, but that comes with a risk of miscarriage (1/300).

She tried to reassure us by telling us that the babies hands were open, which is a good sign.

Has anyone ever experienced this? My husband and I are both very concerned about the health of our baby.