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Aspirin Doesn’t Prevent Pregnancy Loss, Shows Study

It is common in the U.S. for doctors to prescribe low doses of aspirin for prospective mothers who have had a previous pregnancy loss. This is despite the fact that aspirin therapy has not been proven...
Aspirin Doesn’t Prevent Pregnancy Loss, Shows Study
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  • It is common in the U.S. for doctors to prescribe low doses of aspirin for prospective mothers who have had a previous pregnancy loss. This is despite the fact that aspirin therapy has not been proven to increase the likelihood of viable pregnancies.

    The idea is that increased blood flow to the uterus might help pregnancies that would otherwise be lost. Now a new study has shown that there may be no connection at all.

    The study, published in journal The Lancet, shows that low-dose aspirin therapy does not prevent pregnancy loss among women who have experienced one or two previous miscarriages.

    “Our results indicate that aspiirin is not effective for reducing the chances of pregnancy loss in most cases,” said Enrique Schisterman, first author of the study and chief of Epidemiology at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

    Schisterman and his colleagues looked at more than 1,000 women who had a history of pregnancy loss. The women were given either aspirin or a placebo and followed throughout their pregnancies.

    Of the women in the study who received aspirin, 13% became pregnant but lost the pregnancy. This companres to 12% of the placebo group who also lost a pregnancy. A full 58% of the aspirin group became pregnant and game birth, compared to 53% of the placebo group. The study’s authors concluded that the differences between these two groups were not large enough to make the case for a difference in pregnancy loss caused by aspirin therapy.

    One interesting finding of the study, though, is that a small group of women in the study who had experienced only one pregnancy loss within the past year did show a significant rise in the rate of pregnancy and birth when on aspirin therapy. Of these women, the 78% receiving aspirin became pregnant during the study, while 66% of those on a placebo became pregnant. Of the aspirin-receiving women who became pregnant, 62% went on to give birth. Of the pregnant women receiving the placebo, 53% went on to give birth.

    Image via Thinkstock

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