"This is a drug we have been using for a while," said Wu.
A Danish http://zofranrecallcenter.com/zofran-birth-defects-lawsuit/ study should reassure women who need the drug.
According to Associated Press, one in 10 pregnant women have nausea and vomiting bad enough to require medication. However, she advised that women should try treating morning sickness with crackers, ginger ale and certain B vitamins and use Zofran or one of the other prescription anti-nausea medicines as a last resort.
"Whenever possible, nothing or simple is better" than a drug, especially in the first three months of pregnancy, she said.
.
The study, led by Bjorn Pasternak, MD, PhD, of the Department of Epidemiology Research at Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, Denmark, used data from 608,385 pregnancies between 2004 and 2011. Of the women who took the morning sickness drug in the first trimester, just over 1 percent had a miscarriage, versus almost 4 percent of women who did not take the drug. Nobody is giving you a gold star for suffering through this."
Hoskins added that poor nutrition because of excessive vomiting can harm the mother and the fetus.
The best kinds of studies for researching a drug's benefits and risks are controlled clinical trials where patients are randomly assigned to take a medication or a placebo. Researchers looked at nationwide health registries to compare the rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, preterm delivery, major birth defects or low birth weight babies among the women who took Zofran during their pregnancies and those who did not. Because it is considered unethical to conduct such studies on pregnant women, doctors in this case had to rely on records-based research.
The study found no evidence of major birth-related problems in women who took Zofran
