Nonprescription Drugs in Pregnancy: Your Guide to Fetal Risk for the Active Ingredients in 500 Over-the-counter Drugs

Many women of child-bearing age buy over-the-counter medications for a variety of disorders, such as seasonal allergies, colds, headaches, and others. Whether planning their pregnancy or already pregnant, they want to know if these nonprescription drugs are safe for unborn babies. All nonprescription drugs contain one or more active ingredients that treat the patient's symptoms and are actually drugs themselves. Twenty to thirty years ago, many of these active ingredients were FDA-approved prescription drugs. At the time, those prescription drugs were assigned a Pregnancy Risk Category: A, B, C, D, or X. Although some of these drugs switched from prescription to nonprescription status, meaning they could be sold over-the-counter, their Pregnancy Risk Categories still applied. This unique book contains the FDA's Pregnancy Risk Categories for the active ingredients in five hundred nonprescription drugs, and includes a procedure for locating risk categories for any drug that isn't in the book.

D. Gary Benfield, M.D. practiced neonatology (caring for sick newborns) at Akron Children's Hospital in Akron, Ohio, for thirty-five years. He is Professor Emeritus of Clinical Pediatrics at the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy in Rootstown, Ohio, and has had research articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pediatrics, and other medical journals. He writes a€?The Baby Beat,a€ a weekly medical column for The Review, Alliance, Ohio's daily newspaper, and is the author of Walking the Baby Beat: Answers to Hundreds of Your Healthcare Questions, also published by Smart Start Press. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1959, his M.D. from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1965, and his M.A. in philosophy from Kent State University in 1988.