Asthma Medication While Pregnant

Saturday, July 18, 2009, 10:33
Asthma
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Andrew:

Dr. Shapiro, we’ve gotten an e-mail question from England from a woman named Anne, and here’s a little bit of Anne’s story. When she was pregnant with her son she had a severe asthma attack, and it was acute. She said she nearly died and also nearly lost the baby. She was on the highest amount of oxygen permitted, and her blood level remained at 30 percent, she says. The medication given was intravenous, and there are a long list of drugs here, including some of the ones you mentioned, and Atrovent, Serevent and Ventolin. She said she refused to be ventilated, and she was told that the medication could have side-effects on her baby, but it would be unknown until the baby was two. Now her child is 3 ½ years old and he’s been diagnosed with milk intolerance, allergies, hyperactivity and it’s recently been brought to her attention, she says, “that he may have been bordering on autism. After my research, my husband and I think it may be ADHD.” So we’d like to know if the medication could have caused this during the pregnancy?

Dr. Shapiro:

It’s very unlikely. Thankfully, most of the medications for asthma during pregnancy do not have a bad effect on the baby. It sounds like you had just a terrible time, and there’s always risk that not having enough oxygen could have affected the baby. But the bloodstream in babies before they’re born has an amazing resiliency, an amazing ability to preserve oxygen for the baby, even though the mother may be having some difficulties. So the most likely thing is that these problems that your child is having now, with the possible ADH diagnosis, are not due to the stormy course that you had during the delivery. And the fact that the child is showing allergies just fits with the situation in your family where there are these allergy and asthma problems, and one shouldn’t be surprised that a child would have the problem too. So I think that you may be very concerned that something went wrong and you, perhaps, caused the child to have these problems. I doubt that what went on during the labor really made a difference for what’s going on with your child now.

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