New Risk Found for Heart Medicine; After Use in First Trimester, Some Blood-Pressure Drugs Tied to More Birth Defects

• Published in: The Wall Street journal. Eastern edition
• Main Author: Seward, Zachary M
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, N.Y Dow Jones & Company Inc 08.06.2006
• Edition: Eastern edition
• Subjects: Birth defects; Blood pressure; Diuretics; Drug therapy; Fetuses; Health risk assessment; Hypertension; Medicine; Pregnancy; Prescription drugs; Womens health
• ISSN: 0099-9660

In an accompanying editorial in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, Jan M. Friedman, a geneticist at the University of British Columbia, expressed surprise that the first-trimester birth defects had taken so long to emerge. "This is not the last word on the subject," Dr. Friedman wrote, "but it is shocking to realize that it is almost the first." The FDA said it would release a public health advisory but wouldn't change the medication's "black box" warning, which cautions of serious risks only in the second and third trimesters. Robert J. Temple, director of medical policy at the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said, "People who are in a situation where they're thinking about getting pregnant should talk to their physician about taking an alternative medicine to treat high blood pressure."