Pregnancy and Pills
New research finds prescriptions may be safer than you think
Matters of time. Because it can take as long as 10 years for doctors to collect enough case reports to know whether a new drug is safe in pregnancy, drug companies and academic institutions are now using "pregnancy registries" to speed things up. They hope that these registries, which track women who have taken a specific drug, will cut the time it takes to collect data in half.
In the future, doctors may be able to prescribe "fetus friendly" drugs. At the University of Kansas, researchers are developing models of the human placenta that will allow them to figure out why certain drugs cross the placenta and others don't. One theory focuses on protein transporters that carry substances such as nutrients across the placenta to the fetus. One called P-glycoprotein acts as a barrier to many types of drugs trying to pass through. "We'd like to figure out what makes a drug able to be recognized by the protein, and [to] develop drugs that have that quality," says researcher Kenneth Audus. It will be at least five to 10 years before these drugs are available, he says.
In the meantime, there is no doubt that taking medications during pregnancy is risky and should only be done when medically necessary. Paulette Carter, a Long Beach, Miss., woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer 6 1/2 months into her pregnancy at age 32, is one patient who felt she had no choice. She underwent two rounds of chemotherapy in the experimental program for pregnant women at the University of Texas. "Not a minute went by," Carter says, "when I didn't fear that what I was doing was going to hurt my baby." As it turns out, Carter delivered a healthy baby girl. She is cancer free. And she is pregnant again.
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