Women with Lupus Overwhelmingly Have Healthy Pregnancies

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In contradiction to long-standing beliefs, a healthy pregnancy is possible for women who have lupus, Dr. Jill Buyon says.

In contradiction to long-standing beliefs, a healthy pregnancy is possible for women who have lupus, says Jill Buyon, M.D., a rheumatologist and lupus specialist from New York University School of Medicine.

“Patients with lupus have been under the impression that pregnancy would be a very dangerous thing for them. From the mother’s perspective, the concerns are:  Will the mother sustain a lupus flare? For mothers who have once had kidney involvement:  How safe is it to get pregnant? Will there be adverse pregnancy outcomes? Will the baby be very small? Will the baby be born so early that it needs to be in the hospital for a long time. And, of course, the scary question is:  Will my baby die? These are the outcomes we look at from the perspective of counseling and what we wanted to learn from this study,” she said.

Dr. Buyon recently published research in the Annals of Internal Medicine showing that women with relatively inactive lupus without serious flares experienced a normal pregnancy with a positive outcome.

Study participants were women, ages 18-to-45, enrolled in the Predictors of Pregnancy Outcome: Biomarker in Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome and Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (PROMISSE) Trial. The investigation was multi-center, multi-racial and multi-ethnic.

Out of the 385 women followed during the study, 81 percent experienced no adverse events. Overall, 9 percent of pregnancies resulted in premature birth, 4 percent experienced pregnancy loss during the second or third trimester, 1 percent encountered infant death due to pregnancy complications, and 10 percent had very low birth weight.

Throughout the study, investigators identified four factors that appeared to increase a woman's likelihood for a negative outcome - high blood pressure during pregnancy, more active lupus during gestation, low platelet count, and a positive lupus anticoagulant test during the first trimester.

“The patients who tended to be more sick at the outset, tended to be those who might have an adverse pregnancy outcome. The highest risk factor is the presence of something called a lupus anticoagulant. The presence of this abnormal blood test is very important and one that absolutely all doctors should test for,” Dr. Buyon said.

In addition, race and ethnicity - black, Hispanic and Asian - contributed to poor outcomes and was in and of itself, a risk factor. Dr. Buyon said she doubts it is due to socioeconomic factors because the patients were treated by similar doctors in tertiary care centers. She suspects it may be due to genetics, which needs to be explored.

Although the findings point to the possibility of healthy pregnancies for this population, Dr. Buyon cautioned women who have high protein levels in urine due to uncontrolled kidney disease could still face significant problems with pregnancy. These women are typically advised to postpone pregnancy until their kidney disease improves.

Ten to 15 percent of patients had a moderate flare requiring minimal medication changes, but less than 5 percent of patients had a flare that required high dose steroids or hospitalization. About one in five patients had a renal flare.

“The other optimistic perspective was that 225 patients never had kidney disease, but many of them had anti DNA antibodies which is an antibody we worry about in developing renal disease. Only four people developed de novo renal disease. For people who had previous kidney disease ... but were in complete remission, they too had very few renal flares. I think this is very encouraging news for women with past renal disease who really are so worried that maybe they’ll never have a healthy pregnancy, that simply is not true (14:01),” Dr. Buyon said.

The hope, she said, is that these findings can be used to inform discussions between doctors and their patients with lupus who are also interested in pursuing pregnancy.

Dr. Buyon discusses the study, its findings and implications in the following video with Rheumatology Network

References:

Jill P. Buyon, MD; Mimi Y. Kim, ScD; Marta M. Guerra, MS, et al. "Predictors of Pregnancy Outcomes in Patients With Lupus: A Cohort Study," Annals of Internal Medicine, Aug. 4, 2015. DOI: 10.7326/M14-2235

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