Prescribing during pregnancy

Last month, the research roundup provided you with an overview of articles looking at adverse drug reactions (Robertson, 2023). This month, three articles will be reviewed that look at the complex issues encountered when prescribing during pregnancy will be reviewed. The first article looks at polypharmacy and associated risks, the second examines the use of antidepressants and the risk of gestational diabetes and the third looks at the impact of regulatory safety notices on prescribing valproate in women with childbearing potential.

This article was published in BMC Medicine, used a retrospective cohort study approach to examine data between 2000 and 2019 (Subramanian et al, 2023). The author's main driver to conduct this research was to shed light on the prevalence of the use of multiple medications in pregnancy and to identify risk factors for polypharmacy. They accessed the Pregnancy Register in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink, which contains the anonymised medical records of over 20 million patients in 973 GP practices. In the pregnancy section, data could be gathered on estimated start and end dates of pregnancy as well as estimated dates for each trimester. GP-issued prescriptions were also accessible during that time.