Women with epilepsy who have seizures during pregnancy appear more likely to give birth to pre-term, small or low-birth-weight babies than women without epilepsy, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Neurology.
An estimated 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent of pregnant women have epilepsy, the most common major neurologic complication in pregnancy, according to background information in the article. “While approximately 40 percent of the 18 million women with epilepsy in the world are of childbearing age, managing maternal epilepsy and monitoring the health of the developing fetus remain some of the most perplexing and engaging issues in the fields of neurology and obstetrics,” the authors write.
Yi-Hua Chen, Ph.D., of Tai Pei Medical University, Taiwan, and colleagues used data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Data set and analyzed records from 1,016 women with epilepsy who gave birth between 2001 and 2003. Of these, 503 had seizures during pregnancy and 513 did not. A control group of 8,128 women who were the same age and gave birth during the same years but did not have epilepsy or any other chronic disease were selected for comparison.
Compared to women without epilepsy, women who had seizures during pregnancy had a 1.36-fold greater risk of having a low-birth-weight baby (weighing less than 2,500 grams), a 1.63-fold increased risk of giving birth pre-term (before 37 weeks) and a 1.37-fold increased risk of having a baby who was small for gestational age (having a birth weight below the 10th percentile for age). In addition, when compared with women who had epilepsy but did not have seizures, the odds of women who had seizures during pregnancy having a baby who was small for gestational age were 1.34 times greater.