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Abstract
Objective: To investigate the differences in exposure to medications in a cohort of multi-ethnic pregnant women.
Methods: Six hundred and forty-one pregnant women of Western, Arab/Turkish and “other origins” participated in this cross-sectional study using a questionnaire in a university hospital in Brussels, Belgium. Assessment of the drug safety was done using the food and drug administration (FDA) risk classification system. Data analysis was performed using SPSS (Chicago, IL).
Results: In overall cohort, 83.8% used at least one preparation (including multivitamins) during pregnancy and 37.0% of women used at least one drug (excluding multivitamins). Significantly more Western women (43.7%) used one or more medications compared to Arab/Turkish women (28.7%; p = 0.000). This difference in exposure was most pronounced for over-the-counter (OTC) drugs for occasional and pregnancy-related complaints, and was observed for potentially unsafe drugs or drugs with unknown safety. None of the women reported use of FDA X category drugs.
Conclusions: The use of drugs known to be harmful was not observed, but a higher prevalence of exposure to potentially harmful drugs (FDA C/D) was found among Western women who also consumed more OTC drugs. This highlights the need for cautious prescribing for women in the fertile age in general and for continuous monitoring of medication use during pregnancy.
Acknowledgements
We thank Prof. Dr Walter Foulon, Head of the Obstetrics department at the UZ Brussel hospital. Our thanks also go to Dr Monika Laubach, Head of the Obstetrics clinic for helping with the access to data, to the women who participated in the study and to the midwifery of the hospital’s antenatal clinic for their assistance in distributing and collecting the questionnaires. We are grateful to the pharmacist Seham Zaitoon for her help in the data entry.