Care of the pregnant asthmatic

Treatment of asthma in the pregnant female poses a dilemma for the physician who must select medications that will effectively suppress maternal bronchospasm but that will not jeopardize the fetus. To compound the practitioner's problem, the inability to perform human studies with asthma drugs has led the pharmaceutical companies to formally list precautions against the use of antiasthmatic drugs during pregnancy in the Physician's Desk Reference (PDR), a book which is available to the lay public and is often introduced in medicolegal suits as the primary reference for standard of care. This article provides the clinician with the current recommended treatments that are considered acceptable during pregnancy based on the published evidence involving animal studies and the cumulative human experience that is reported in the English language medical literature.