Many women stop asthma meds while pregnant: Study

(REUTERS) - Almost a third of women on asthma medications stop using them during the first few months of pregnancy, despite advice that a mother's uncontrolled asthma is more dangerous to the developing foetus than the drugs, according to a study from the Netherlands.

A lack of oxygen during development, known as hypoxemia, is one of the dangers to a fetus when its mother has uncontrolled asthma.

Researchers, whose findings appeared in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, used information on more than 25,000 pregnancies from a prescription database in the Netherlands.

More than 2,000 of those pregnant women, about 8 per cent, received a prescription for an asthma medication at least once during the study period, from 1994 to 2009.