The Risk of Adverse Pregnancy Outcome After First Trimester Exposure to H1 Antihistamines: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Fatma Etwel, Lauren H. Faught, Michael J. Rieder and Gideon Koren ()
Additional contact information
Fatma Etwel: Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University
Lauren H. Faught: Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University
Michael J. Rieder: Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University
Gideon Koren: Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University

Drug Safety, 2017, vol. 40, issue 2, No 5, 132 pages

Abstract: Abstract Introduction H1 antihistamines are used for the treatment of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy as well as the symptomatic relief of asthma, urticaria, allergy, and the common cold. Although they are overall felt to be safe during pregnancy, recently several studies have challenged this assumption, as millions of women are exposed to them in the first trimester. Methods Following the guidelines of PRISMA, a systematic review was performed to retrieve all published articles involving H1-antihistamine exposure during pregnancy. Electronic databases including PubMed and EMBASE were searched for possibly relevant articles published in any language up to December 2015. Results After removing duplicate publications, and excluding animal studies and studies on drug effectiveness, 342 articles were reviewed in detail and 37 studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis. In cohort studies, the risk of major malformation in the offspring of women exposed to H1 antihistamines was not higher than that of the control population (OR 1.07; 95% CI 0.98–1.16). The Q-statistic for heterogeneity of effects was not significant (p > 0.05, I 2

Keywords: Publication Bias; Pregnancy Outcome; Spontaneous Abortion; Cetirizine; Unexposed Control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40264-016-0479-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:drugsa:v:40:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s40264-016-0479-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/adis/journal/40264

DOI: 10.1007/s40264-016-0479-9

Access Statistics for this article

Drug Safety is currently edited by Nitin Joshi

More articles in Drug Safety from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().