Researchers have been trying to discover if there is any link between the use of antibiotics during pregnancy and birth defects in young infants.
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A group of Canadian scientists found that pregnancy antibiotics are not tied to birth defects in kids as doctors had suspected.
The researchers made this determination by looking at data between 1998 and 2008 from the Quebec Pregnancy Cohort.
A course of antibiotics during pregnancy thankfully won’t bring any immediate harm to your child, according to new research published Friday in the journal Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety.
The team in conclusion, indicated a call for further research to confirm their findings and to test the safety of other less frequently used antibiotics, especially during pregnancy. A few 25% of the pregnant women participating in the study were prescribed antibiotics with clanthromycin and azithromycin which were the most common antibiotics and belong to marcolides which is a class of drugs. They also used data taken from Quebec’s public pharmaceutical insurance program.
Dr. Anick Berard, one of the researchers from the University of Montreal said that with penicillin, macrolides are very commonly used medication for the general population & for pregnancy. “We therefore aimed to estimate the risk of major congenital malformations after fetal exposure to the two most commonly used macrolides, and failed to find any”.
The study found that 9.8 percent of women gave birth to a child with a major congenital malformation, but there didn’t appear to be an noticeable difference in women who took different antibiotics.
About 40 percent of pregnant women are prescribed antibiotics at a few point before their due date, another study found.
As alluded to by Dr. Bérard, the diseases that azithromycin and clarithromycin are used to treat, such as chlamydia, can sometimes have a negative impact on the health of the child, so it’s been hard to tease apart the relationship between antibiotics and birth defects. These two drugs can be safely taken during pregnancy, as they pose no threat to both mother and child.
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Researchers were also quick to note that the study is still unable to clarify what exactly causes the defects, as the antibiotics are also associated with causing these birth defects the same way the infections they typically target.
