Prescribing change, expecting more
UK charity Mummy’s Star is running a cancer and pregnancy awareness week to highlight the devastation caused by the illness. Set up in 2013, Mummy’s Star supports families affected by cancer during pregnancy and those who receive a cancer diagnosis within a year of a birth. Pete Wallroth created the charity after tragedy hit his own family and his wife,…
Read more > Pregnancy and cancer awareness week launched by charity
According to a paper published by US academics in March 2014, pregnant women taking antidepressants are more likely to have their child prematurely. If these findings are accurate, then that’s a concern because of the sheer number of people taking these kinds of drugs. A report published back in 2011 found that 23% of women in their 40s and 50s…
Read more > Antidepressant usage in pregnancy hits the headlines
This is a story of one woman, Liz Joice, who thought she could never have a child because she had been treated for cancer in her early 30s. But then, she became pregnant, and one month into that pregnancy her cancer returned. Liz and her partner faced the impossible decision: conduct a full MRI scan to find out the full…
Read more > Choosing between mom or baby: one mother’s tragic story
Pregnant women expect quite a bit from their healthcare providers, even more so if they have a disease that requires supervision and treatment. We asked some members of our advisory board what their biggest challenges are when it comes to providing pregnant women with a disease – or those who are planning to get pregnant – the appropriate access to…
Read more > The information vacuum and challenges to appropriate care
No doubt the challenges to making appropriate care and information available to women facing illness and pregnancy are many. There are huge information gaps; the information we have is fractured and often hard to interpret; research with pregnant women is scientifically and ethically complex; and law and policy raise daunting barriers to conducting needed studies. Yet in my work on…
There are no clear-cut answers about using chemotherapy to treat cancer in pregnant women – and current advice is usually given on a case-by-case basis. But the fact that doctors do use chemotherapy to treat certain cancers in mothers-to-be today stems from studies started 40 years ago, in Mexico. In 1973, Dr. Agustin Aviles, a doctor working in the public…
Moving the project forward and getting validation on our program’s objectives were key discussions during our first advisory board meeting on March 24, 2014. Meeting via teleconference, we discussed how differentiating ourselves from other debates linked to pregnancy is important, and so is clarifying the purpose of the initiative. The new branding and identity of the program, which we were presented…
Read more > First advisory board meeting for Pregnancy and Medicine Initiative
