Safety of Common Medications for Treating Dermatology Disorders in Pregnant Women

Abstract

Treating the pregnant woman poses challenges to the physician that requires balancing between eliminating or alleviating a condition or disease and ensuring no untoward effects on the mother and fetus. Despite the importance of the task, human studies are limited for obvious reasons, and animal studies do not fully resemble human physiology. Nevertheless, thanks to epidemiology studies and large-scale reviews of case reports on pregnant patients with comorbidities or refractory diseases that necessitate treatment with drugs of uncertain safety, data are accumulating on the safety of medications during pregnancy. This review summarizes the current literature on the safety during pregnancy of medications frequently used for common dermatologic diseases. The goal is to provide physicians with a handy database for when to, and when not to, prescribe those medications. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.