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Medication prescriptions before, during and after pregnancy in Italy: a population-based study
Filomena Fortinguerra1, Valeria Belleudi2, Francesca Romana Poggi2
1Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco (AIFA), Rome, Italy.
Background:
Monitoring medicine prescriptions in pregnancy is an aspect of extreme interest in term of public health.
Methods:
A retrospective prevalence study using administrative healthcare databases was performed in order to evaluate medication prescriptions in Italy. A cohort of 274,938 pregnant women (15-49 years) residing in three Italian regions (Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, Puglia), who delivered in 2014-2017, were enrolled. The prevalence of medication use was estimated as the proportion of pregnant women with any medication prescription in each of the following five trimesters: 1 before pregnancy (pre-T), 3 during pregnancy (1st TP, 2nd TP, 3rd TP) and 1 after pregnancy (post-T).
Results:
About 80% of enrolled pregnant women received at least one prescription during pregnancy, 36.5% before pregnancy and 50.7% in the post-partum. The most prescribed medicine was folic acid (42%), mostly used in 1st TP (35%). Progesterone use was concentrated in 1st TP (19%) and increased as the number of previous abortions. Pregnancy use of antidiabetics, antihypertensives, and thyroid preparations were 24.1‰, 21.5‰, 101.8‰, respectively.
Conclusions:
At the national level, this study confirmed the prescriptive trend observed in other European studies, but a regional variability for all medication groups was found. Further studies are needed in order to identify determinants of medication prescriptions during pregnancy in Italy.
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