Drug use in pregnancy in the county of North Jutland – preliminary analyses based on 6142 pregnancies

Abstract

This paper comprises results of preliminary analyses from the North Jutland Prescription Database regarding drug consumption among pregnant women. study was conducted in the County of North Jutland (487,000 inhabitants) based on two computerized information systems: the Regional Hospital Discharge Registry and the National Health Service (NHS) described in detail in the paper The Pharmacoepidemiologic Prescription Database of North Jutland. From the Regional Hospital Discharge Registry we identified all women who had given birth in the County in 1994 including date of admission to hospital for giving birth and pregnancy outcome, e.g., induced abortion, preterm or term delivery. For technical reasons we could only use the date of admission to hospital for delivery as time of birth in this pilot study. For all pregnancies time-windows around time of birth were calculated. For preterm and term deliveries, pregnancies were assumed to be of 250 and 280 days of duration, respectively. It was assumed that the date of admission to hospital was nearly equal to the date of delivery. time-windows were calculated as follows: