Asthma For Nurses

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Asthma Medicines and Pregnancy?

Lane P. Lester, Ph.D.

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease that makes airways (bronchial tubes) particularly sensitive to irritants, and this is characterized by difficulty in breathing.

Asthma is a highly ranked chronic health condition in adults in most western countries, and it is the leading chronic illness of children.

Asthma cannot be cured, but for most patients it can be controlled so that they have only minimal and infrequent symptoms and they can live an active life.

If you have asthma, managing it is an important part of your life. Controlling your asthma means staying away from things that bother your airways and taking medicines as directed by your doctor.

Good treatment and control of asthma is particularly important for pregnant women.

Far from being dangerous in pregnancies, certain asthma medicines can help to protect your baby and help it to develop normally.

There are no known harmful effects from inhaled steroids (or any preventer inhaler) and bronchodilators (or any reliever inhaler used within reason), even after decades of use by pregnant women, and after decades of study and research.

Many experts have looked at the evidence over the years, and they have all come to the same conclusion: keeping asthma well treated in pregnancy pays dividends in protecting the unborn baby, and no side effects from the medicines comes close to cancelling the real benefits from the treatments.

It is still advisable to keep medicine use to a minimum while carrying my unborn baby.

Here are some other tips for pregnant women :

• Don't smoke during pregnancy and don't allow others to smoke around you during pregnancy. Smoking causes asthma-like changes in your baby's lungs. Smoking is also bad for your asthma. If you don't smoke, or don't live in a smoky environment, then you will probably need less medicine.

• Do what you can to avoid known allergic causes of asthma such as pets and house dust mites during pregnancy. By keeping away from the causes of asthma you will also reduce the amount of medicine you are likely to need.

• Get good, up-to-date, professional advice about your asthma, and take your regular treatment regularly. By doing this you will be less likely to have worsening of your asthma or even an emergency. In other words, regular steady preventer treatment means that you are much less likely to need big doses of drugs because of worsening asthma or asthma attacks.

A pregnant women's asthma symptoms may get worse or better during pregnancy. Asthma gets worse in about one third of pregnant women, occasionally severely so, and if this happens then you should seek expert advice.

A few women get asthma for the very first time while they are pregnant. Or they may have had asthma as a child and suddenly get it again while they are expecting. Pregnancy can have a bad effect on asthma.

If your asthma has just started or re-started, this means your lungs are basically very close to normal, so treatment should be very effective.

On very rare occasions, asthma can be particularly bad during pregnancy, and the expectant mother has to be admitted to hospital to control the asthma. Although this is bad, the good news is that such asthma gets much better again after pregnancy.

If you are in this situation, try to get treated by an asthma specialist, and not just the obstetrician or a general physician.

The rules for dealing with asthma during pregnancy are basically the same as at other times. The big difference is that you should get more attention and care than most people get at other times.

I hope this asthma article was helpful to you, no matter how much... or how little it had to do with asthma for nurses.

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