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Editorial
September 2016

Use of Antipsychotics During Pregnancy: Pregnant Women Get Sick—Sick Women Get Pregnant

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Psychiatry, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois
  • 2Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois
  • 3Departments of Pharmacy Practice and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois, Chicago
  • 4Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla
  • 5Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla
JAMA Psychiatry. 2016;73(9):901-903. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.1538

The blunt subtitle focuses attention on the pregnant woman as “the last true therapeutic orphan.”1(p227) Because of ethical, medicolegal, and fetal safety concerns, they have been excluded from treatment studies. Pregnant women constitute a disadvantaged population that has been “protected” from participation in research, only to carry the burden, with their prescribers, of a paucity of information to inform treatment decision making. Through the TRxeating For Two initiative, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has promoted a conceptual shift from the dogma that medications during pregnancy must be avoided to their use to “improve the health of women and babies by working to identify the safest treatment options for the management of common conditions before and during pregnancy” (http://www.cdc.gov/pregnancy/meds/treatingfortwo/facts.html).

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