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Old December 29th 03, 07:22 AM
CY
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Default pregnancy and asthma (and advair in particular)

This is from Thomas Hales Medications & Mothers Milk (but which also talks
about pg'y):

Advair is a combination of product containing Fluticasone and Salmeterol
(Flovent & Serevent).

That's pretty much all it says re pregnancy unfortunately, but now that you
know the two ingredients you may have better luck googling. I did a quick
google and came up with this from
http://www.medicinenet.com/fluticaso...r/article.htm:

PREGNANCY: Adequate studies of fluticasone or inhaled salmeterol during
pregnancy have not been done. Fluticasone use during pregnancy should be
avoided unless the potential benefit justifies the potential but unknown
risk to the fetus. In some, but not all, pregnant animal models exposure to
very high doses of oral salmeterol has led to offspring with birth defects.
The concentrations of salmeterol in the blood after these very high doses,
however, were much higher than the concentrations observed after inhalation.
Salmeterol inhalation should be used during pregnancy only if the potential
benefit justifies the potential risk to the fetus.

and this from here http://health.yahoo.com/health/drug/500235/precaution:

Pregnancy - The combination of fluticasone and salmeterol has not been
studied in pregnant women. However, studies in animals have shown that the
fluticasone and salmeterol causes problems. Before taking this medicine,
make sure your doctor knows if you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant.

So your decision to stop is probably a wise one.



Sorry I didn't give you a whole lot more than you already knew!


CY

"Vicky Bilaniuk" wrote in message
...
OK, I would love to know what you all think of pregnancy and asthma,
and, in particular, advair. When I talked to my doctor about pregnancy,
he never mentioned anything about the advair that I use, but I have
recently been wondering about it. I suffer from mild but persistent
side effects and have decided to go off of it (I've been toying with the
idea of going off of it for a long time, now, but being pregnant is what
finally did it). My asthma is actually not all that bad. I don't
suffer from classic attacks, so IOW, going off of the medication won't
be like welcoming death, or something. ;-) Going off of the drug will
just mean that I'll get a bit more, uh, phlegmy (yeah, TMI, I know).

One thing I worry about, though: I just read that advair is a class C
drug, meaning that effects have been observed on rat fetuses, but there
are insufficient data regarding the effects on human fetuses (i.e. there
have not been enough studies done - and in fact, one page I saw claimed
that there were no studies done regarding this at all, but I don't know
what is true, and it's hard to judge fact from fiction when the official
advair site has nothing on pregnancy at all (or maybe that should tell
me something)). Now, I have already decided to go off of this drug, so
once the medication is out of my system, I won't have to worry. ;-)
However, I'm curious, and I would like to know if anyone has any more
up-to-date info about known possible effects of advair on a fetus.

Thanks!