Pregnant women on anxiety pills are 70pc more likely to miscarry
PREGNANT women prescribed sleep and anti-anxiety medication could be at greater risk of a miscarriage, a study has suggested.
Researchers in Taiwan analysed more than three million pregnancies in nearly two million women and found that those prescribed the drugs were 70 per cent more likely to lose their child.
Fewer than 1 per cent of pregnant women in Britain are offered the sedatives, such as diazepam or lorazepam, each year to help with insomnia or anxiety disorders.
However, it still means tens of thousands of women are being prescribed the drugs while pregnant.
The drugs are sold under brand names such as Valium and Xanax but the study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, did not specify which had been taken. In the research, about 4.4 per cent of women had miscarriages with fludiazepam found to more than double the risk. Alprazolam had the lowest risk at 39 per cent.
Experts from National Taiwan University concluded: “Benzodiazepine use during pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of miscarriage, even after accounting for unmeasured confounders, including those related to genetics and the family environment.
“The observation of an increased risk of miscarriage associated with benzodiazepine use during pregnancy suggests that benzodiazepines should only be used after a thorough evaluation of the potential benefits and risks for both the mother and child.”
British experts warned that benzodiazepine use should be kept as low as possible but they said that other reasons could be driving the link between the drugs and miscarriages, such as underlying conditions which needed medication. Prof Sir Simon Wessely, regius chairman of psychiatry at King’s College London, said: “It’s well conducted with big numbers, and I am in no doubt that they found an association. But the big question is, is this cause and effect? And the problem is that we can’t tell.
“There may be plenty of reasons why someone is being prescribed benzodiazepines and is also at higher risk of miscarriage.
“They did the best they could to control these, and the association remained but it’s always an issue in this kind of study. The main lesson is that, for lots of reasons, we should continue all efforts to reduce the prescriptions of benzodiazepines anyway, especially for anything more than a very short period.”
In 2020, Stanford University in California found that women who take the sedatives in the weeks before conception were 50 per cent more likely to have an ectopic pregnancy.