Teratogenic drugs in pregnancy.

Abstract

Anxiety about birth defects is a major parental concern during pregnancy and doctors and their patients often seek information about the potential teratogenicity of drugs that are taken by or prescribed for the pregnant woman. Given the multiplicity of drugs that are available, the relatively common occurrence of birth defects (around 40 per 1000 births), the paucity of reliable data on the human teratogenicity of drugs and the scattered nature of these data in the medical literature, it is often a difficult task for the clinician to determine the effect of a particular drug on the developing fetus. It is the purpose of this paper to provide some general guidelines to assess the teratogenic ..