Research by DoM's Dr. Padma Kaul provides new website for pregnant women with much-needed info on medications
19 November 2024
By Gillian Rutherford, Folio
Pregnant women in Canada have a new place to look for evidence-based information on the safety of prescription medications with today’s launch of the Healthy Pregnancy Hub. The new site includes a bilingual library, infographics, videos and podcasts, as well as a search function.
The site is based on research from the Canadian Mother-Child Cohort, which includes data from 500,000 Alberta women who gave birth to 900,000 babies between 2005 and 2023. The cohort examines gestational medication use and the frequency of prematurity, low birth weight, major malformations and multiple births in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec.
Nearly 70 per cent of pregnant women take medications, but there is little clinical trial evidence available about their impact on this population because pregnant women are usually excluded as clinical trial subjects, according to Alberta principal investigator Padma Kaul.
“In the absence of any data from trials, large observational studies are the ones that will provide the best level of evidence,” says Kaul, an epidemiologist in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta. “If women have questions about medications, rather than just stop taking them or being hesitant, we want to provide them with a resource.”