Abstract
To explore pregnant women's use, attitudes, knowledge and beliefs of complementary and alternative drugs (CADs) defined as products manufactured from herbs or with a natural origin. A preliminary survey was conducted among 172 pregnant women in their third trimester of pregnancy, consecutively recruited in two obstetrical settings; 15 women were randomly selected to compute a test-to-retest analysis. Response rate was 87.2%. Test-to-retest analysis showed a questionnaire's reproducibility exceeding a K-value of 0.7 for all items. Mean age was 32.4 ± 0.4 years; most women were nulliparae (62.7%). The majority of subjects (68%) declared to have used one or more CADs during their lifetime; 48% of pregnant women reported taking at least one CAD previously and during the current pregnancy. Women's habitual use of CADs meant they were at higher risk of taking CADs also during pregnancy (adjusted odds ratio = 10.8; 95% confidence interval: 4.7–25.0). Moreover, 59.1% of the subjects were unable to correctly identify the type of CADs they were using. The majority of women resorted to gynecologists as the primary information source for CADs during pregnancy, while they mainly referred to herbalists when not pregnant. Habitual use of CADs seems to be a strong predictor for their ingestion also during pregnancy; in addition most subjects were unable to correctly identify the products they were taking. In the light of the scanty data concerning the safety of CADs during pregnancy, these preliminary results confirm the need to investigate thoroughly the situation of pregnant women and CADs consumption.
Highlights
According to the definition provided by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), ‘Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is a broad domain of healing resources that encompasses all health systems, modalities and practices and their accompanying theories and beliefs, other than those intrinsic to the politically dominant health system of a particular society or culture in a given historical period
In the last decade, an important increase in the use of CAM has been observed in Europe, USA and Australia [2,4,5], in which most studies showed women as the major users of alternative medicines when compared with men [2,4,5]
More than a half (52%) of the sample were convinced that complementary and alternative drugs (CADs) are safer than conventional medications during pregnancy, while 62.7% considered CADs as having equal efficacy as conventional drugs. This is the first Italian study investigating attitudes, beliefs and knowledge of CADs in pregnant women, and is the first work conducted with the aim at characterizing CAD users. These results emphasize that the use of CADs during pregnancy is a widespread habit among Italian women, who demonstrate not to be able to classify the CADs in the proper category
Summary
According to the definition provided by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), ‘Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is a broad domain of healing resources that encompasses all health systems, modalities and practices and their accompanying theories and beliefs, other than those intrinsic to the politically dominant health system of a particular society or culture in a given historical period. In the last decade, an important increase in the use of CAM has been observed in Europe, USA and Australia [2,4,5], in which most studies showed women as the major users of alternative medicines when compared with men [2,4,5]. The main reason for use was concern about the toxicity of conventional medicines [6]
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