Allergies During Pregnancy

If you're allergic and pregnant, you may have questions about whether your allergies or medications could harm your baby. Pregnancy can be a realistic worry for women with allergic asthma, since poor control of asthma during pregnancy is not healthy for the mother or baby. Pregnancy can reduce allergy symptoms in some women, and most - including Asthma patients - have trouble-free pregnancies.

If your symptoms require medications, you may need to do some planning. Ideally, you should talk to the doctor treating your allergies or consult an allergist before becoming pregnant.

Discuss the safety for pregnancy of each of the medications that you use. There's no way to predict how the immune system will react for an individual woman during her pregnancy. About one out of three women report their allergy symptoms (Asthma or Allergic rhinitis) get worse, another one out of three say they improve and the remainder notice no difference.

Most cases of allergic rhinitis (hay fever) are mild enough that they would not cause you to require any special planning for your pregnancy. Of course, it is not always realistic for you to determine the timing of your pregnancy. However, if you have severe hay fever, it would be ideal for you to plan your pregnancy so that your first trimester doesn't coincide with hay-fever season. Most allergy treatments are considered to be reasonably safe for use in pregnancy, but doctors have not organized studies large enough to prove absolute safety. For this reason, it is best to minimize the use of medicines during the first trimester, unless you and your doctor have determined that medicines are important for you to continue for your health. Try to avoid the triggers for your allergy symptoms during your pregnancy, so medication use can be minimized.

If you have been taking allergy shots before your pregnancy, you can continue them during pregnancy: current research indicates they pose no harm to a fetus. However, most physicians would advise that you do not start allergy shots during your pregnancy to avoid any potential allergic reactions.

The US Food and Drug Administration rates every drug with a letter that identifies how safe a medicine appears to be in pregnancy. Ratings of category "A" indicate proven safety. Ratings of "A" are rare for medications, because a drug must be studied in large experimental trials to gain this rating. Most medicines are rated with a "B" or a "C" class rating. "B" ratings are provided when we have a reasonable amount of experience with a medication in pregnant women (even if no large trials have been conducted), and no reason to believe that the medicine would cause harm. If a medicine has not been used in pregnant women, or if it can be shown to cause any harms when it is used in pregnant animals, that medicine will get a class "C" rating or a worse rating. Your pharmacist or your doctor can help you to review the rating of any medication.