Archives for September 2009

Pregnant women are deluged with advice about things to avoid: caffeine, paint, soft cheese, sushi. Even when evidence of possible harm is weak or purely theoretical, the overriding caveat is, “Don’t take it, don’t use it, don’t do it.”

In a few contexts, the admonition is warranted; in most, it is merely inconvenient and anxiety provoking. But in the case of pandemic influenza, it may be deadly. With the second wave of swine flu at hand, and up to 50 percent of the public at risk, the usual mode of thinking about pregnancy and medications threatens to make a worrisome situation worse.

The dangers of this mentality became frighteningly apparent this summer, when a study in The Lancet reported strikingly high rates of death and of complications like pneumonia in pregnant women with H1N1 influenza. Pregnancy meant a fourfold risk of hospitalization, sometimes with a tragic outcome; all the pregnant women who died had been relatively healthy to begin with.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have since put pregnant women at the top of the priority list for the vaccine, and have recommended that pregnant women start antiviral medications as soon as possible after exposure to the virus and after the onset of flu symptoms.

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Pregnancy increases the risk for the occurrence, or worsening, of restless legs syndrome, says an Italian study in the Sept. 28 issue of Neurology.

The study of 606 women found that at least one in four pregnant women experience the syndrome, a movement disorder characterized by an urge to move the legs, generally accompanied by numbness, tingling or burning sensations.

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When Marthese Portelli told her employer she was pregnant, his first reaction was: "Does that mean you're leaving?" At that point she thought she would lose her job but then he told her he would do anything to keep her. This included hiring a nanny of her choice and allowing her to work from home and take as much maternity leave as she needed.

Now a former Nationalist Party MEP candidate and still a director at WasteServ, Mrs Portelli says her boss was "an angel" for going out of his way in such a manner. But even though she acknowledges that this cannot happen all the time, she argues that in many cases it can and should happen... and could also make economic sense for the companies themselves.

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When Sarah Joanis found out she was pregnant, she was so thrilled -- and surprised -- that she took 12 home pregnancy tests in a row and photographed the positive results.

Three months later, however, Sarah, a former Michigander, and her husband, Kevin, who now live in Plainfield, Ill., received another shock: Her ovarian cancer had returned. She was 29 years old.

One of every 1,000 pregnant women in the United States has cancer, a stark convergence of life and death. For these women, treatment is possible. But it comes with terrifying decisions for the family.

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BBC news said today that "children born to women taking anti-depressants in early pregnancy have a small but important increased risk of heart defects". It reported on a Danish study that looked at over 400,000 children born between 1996 and 2003. This research investigated whether taking antidepressants called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in the first trimester of pregnancy affected the rate of malformations.  It found that defects in the wall separating the left and rightADVERTISEMENT  chambers in the heart were 0.4% more common in children of women taking SSRIs. No other malformations were associated with SSRI use.

Although this study suggests that SSRI use in early pregnancy may increase the risk of septal heart defects in the baby, it is important to note that the absolute risk of it happening is small, (less than 1%). In general, doctors try to avoid prescribing drugs for women who are pregnant in case they have effects on the baby. However, depression is a serious illness and in some cases, the benefits of antidepressant treatment may be considered to outweigh the potential risks.

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If you take antidepressants such as fluoxetine (marketed as Prozac) early in your pregnancy, you may be doubling the risk that your newborn will be born with a heart defect, according to a new study.

However, the vast majority of children born to women who take such antidepressants - known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) - do not have such defects, the researchers are quick to note.

Earlier studies have tied SSRIs during pregnancy to heart defects, but also to even more serious birth defects. According to the new study of nearly half a million children born in Denmark between 1996 and 2003, however, only heart defects are likely to be associated with the antidepressants, note co-author Dr. Lars Henning Pedersen, from Aarhus University, Denmark, and colleagues.

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Carolyn Savage didn't know what to think, what to say, where to look as the ultrasound wand glided over her belly. It was supposed to be her baby inside. Not someone else's.

Yet here she was in her doctor's office in the US with the baby's biological mother, both brought together by a terrible error at a fertility clinic. A doctor, they said, had given Savage the wrong embryo, and now she was carrying the other woman's child. "The wand is on my abdomen and the technician's talking to someone else: 'There's your baby's nose. There's your baby's head,'" she said. "It was surreal.

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Women who have abortions could be posing a risk to future children, according to research published today. A Canadian medical study found that those who abort a pregnancy could run the risk of giving birth to premature of low-weight children in subsequent pregnancies. It discovered that women who had undergone more than one abortion had a 72 per cent increased risk for low birth weight and 93 per cent risk of prematurity.

It also found that women who had an abortion in the first or second trimester had a 35 per cent increased risk of giving birth to a low-weight birth baby and a 36 per cent increased risk of having a premature baby,
The study was set up to investigate why babies are born premature and underweight.

The researchers looked at 37 studies around the world carried out between 1965 and 2001 to determine whether previous abortion may be one of the factors. The authors of the review, published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, say there could be several reasons for their findings - the most likely of which is physical damage to the cervix caused by older methods of abortion.

The author of the review, Dr Prakesh Shah, of the paediatrics department at the at Mount Sinai hospital in Toronto, said: 'When a woman comes for induced termination of pregnancy, she should be counselled about that risk. 'At least she will be able to make an informed choice.'Josephine Quintavalle of the Pro-Life Alliance said: 'Women having counselling over difficult or unplanned pregnancies should be made aware of all the consequences.'

States with populations that express strong religious beliefs also have high teenage birth rates, according to a new study. That's the conclusion drawn by Dr. Joseph M. Strayhorn, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with faculty appointments at Drexel University College of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh.

His analysis, written with co-author Jillian Strayhorn, was recently published in the open access journal Reproductive Health.

The authors correlated data collected by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2008 data with teen birth rate data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and income data from the U.S. Bureau of Census.

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Women who had an increase in blood pressure during pregnancy are likely to develop heart disease at an earlier age than women who maintained normal blood pressure while they were pregnant, Chilean researchers report.

Dr. Gloria Valdes of Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Santiago and colleagues studied 217 women with an average age of about 61 years, who underwent a coronary artery examination about 30 years after their last pregnancy.

As reported in the medical journal Hypertension, 146 women had had normal blood pressure during their pregnancies while 71 women had hypertension during at least one pregnancy.

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