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Some women carry anti-Ro antibodies without knowing it, and often without being ill at all. In pregnancy those antibodies cross the placenta, and in a small number of cases they damage the developing conduction system of the fetal heart, so the heart's own electrical signal stops getting through. The result is congenital heart block: a fetus with a dangerously slow heartbeat, sometimes needing a pacemaker at birth, sometimes not surviving to it. The question a woman asks is simple and the answer is not. She wants to know the risk to this pregnancy, and if a previous child was affected, the risk to the next one. The figures she is quoted come from cohorts of different sizes, in different countries, screened in different ways, and the range is wide enough to be no use to anybody. This project pools them into two numbers: how often heart block appears in an exposed pregnancy, and how often it happens again after an affected child. The work is reading and analysis, and it ends in a submitted paper.
Read up on anti-Ro antibodies in pregnancy and how congenital heart block is detected. Help run the search, screen studies, extract the incidence and recurrence figures, and write a section of the paper.
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