ORIGINAL ARTICLE Drug use during early pregnancy: Cross-sectional analysis from the Childbirth and Health Study in Primary Care in Iceland

Objective. To analyse drug use in early pregnancy with special focus on socio-demographic factors associated with psycho-tropic and analgesic drug use. Design. Cross-sectional study. Setting and subjects. A total of 1765 women were invited via their local health care centres, and 1111 participated at 11 – 16 weeks of pregnancy by fi lling out a postal questionnaire concerning socio-demographic and obstetric background, stressful life events, and drug use. Main outcome measures. Drug use prior to and early on in pregnancy, socio-demographic factors, smoking, and adverse life events were investigated. Drug categories screened for were psychotropics (collective term for antidepressants, relaxants, and sleep medication), analgesics, hormones, nicotine, vitamins/minerals, and homeopathic medicine. Results. Drug use from the aforementioned drug cat-egories, excluding vitamins/minerals and homeopathic medicine, was reduced by 18 % during early pregnancy, compared with six months prior to conception (49 % vs. 60%). Psychotropic drug use during early pregnancy was associated with elementary maternal education (p 0.5), being unemployed (p 0.001), being single/divorced/separated (p 0.01), smok-ing prior to or during pregnancy (p 0.01), forced to change job/move house (p 0.001), and psychotropic drug use six months prior to pregnancy (p 0.001). No items on the stressful life events scale were associated with increased analgesi