A recent study reveals that among pregnant women, early initiation of low-dose aspirin largely reduces the incidence of pre-eclampsia and related neonatal outcomes without increasing the risk of bleeding.
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| Photo: Low-dose Aspirin During Pregnancy | InStyleHealth |
A low-dose aspirin has been used as a preventive
measure against pre-eclampsia, so experts looked at existing literature to
carefully investigate the maternal and neonatal outcomes related to the prophylactic
use of aspirin during pregnancy by utilizing a stratification procedure.
Meta-analysis covered the placebo-controlled
randomized trials with sufficient raw data and published in English. Review
articles, editorials, case studies, conference abstracts, and non-placebo-controlled
studies were excluded.
There was a total of 35 placebo-controlled randomized
trials with 46,568 pregnant women who met the criteria for inclusion. Collected
data showed that aspirin prophylaxis conferred a significant protection against
the risk of pre-eclampsia, preterm birth, perinatal mortality, and intrauterine
growth retardation. The said benefits did not come with an increased bleeding
risk.
Notably, low-dose aspirin yielded a meaningful
improvement in neonatal birth weight but did not reduce the risk of gestational
hypertension.
For subgroup analysis, the use of prophylactic
low-dose aspirin conferred the said benefits which is lower pre-eclampsia risk
and enhanced birth weight and gestational age at delivery among women who
initiated the treatment prior 20 weeks of gestation.
On the other hand, low-dose aspirin exerted little effect
on pregnancy results. As such, further evaluation is warranted.
For complete details of the clinical study or
meta-analysis, you may click here.
Source: Am J Prev Med
2021;doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2021.01.032