Cerebral palsy can happen with long term use of steroids
The risk of cerebral palsy can increase in unborn premature babies when repeated courses of a corticosteroid called betamethasone are administered to these children to improve the rate of survival.
The finding was part of results from a multi-center study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and led by Ronald Wapner, M.D., professor of obstetrics and gynecology, Columbia University Medical Center and attending obstetrician and gynecologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia.
From Sciencedaily.com:
Up until the year 2000, obstetrician-gynecologists frequently repeated the course of steroids every week, up to 10 to 11 times, in women who remained pregnant after the first course. A NIH panel that year, concerned with the lack of safety data for this practice, suggested multiple courses should be strictly reserved for patients enrolled in clinical trials.
In one of the first such trials to examine the long-term effects of the treatment on the children, women who remained pregnant a week after the initial course of corticosteroids were randomly assigned to weekly courses of corticosteroids or placebo until their babies were born.
The study, performed by members of the NIH-sponsored Maternal-Fetal Medicine Network followed a total of 556 infants at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia and 12 other sites around the country, and found that by ages two to three, the two groups of children were physically and neurologically identical, except that six out of 248 children who received multiple courses of corticosteroids had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, compared to only 1 out of 238 children in the placebo group. The mothers of all six children with cerebral palsy in the corticosteroid group had received four or more courses of the drug.
The research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health and the study results were published in an issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Tags: betamethasone, cerebral palsy, corticosteroid, Steroids
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