Drug Safety in Pregnancy & Lactation | Breastfeeding Drug Safety | Pharmacovigilance | BPharm Notes
During pregnancy, a large part of the body is affected by the physiological and anatomical changes that start in early pregnancy. Many of these changes significantly affect the pharmacokinetic
(absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion) and pharmacodynamic properties of different drugs (1-3). During treatment, the use of medicines with the content of only some active
ingredients is important to ensure maternal and fetal safety during pregnancy (4-6).
Drug–nutritional element interactions are defined as the physicochemical, physiological, and
pathophysiological relationships between a drug and nutritional element or between a drug
and multiple nutritional elements, nutrients, and constituents or the nutritional status in a
broader sense (6-8). Drug–nutritional element interactions can occur in four steps: extracellular
bioinactivation, decrease/increase in absorption, decrease/increase in efficacy, and decrease/
increase in excretion (elimination) (7).
Therefore, the fact that health professionals consider the physiological changes and the factors affecting the distribution of the drug in the body during pregnancy is important to ensure the effectiveness of pharmacotherapy. In this review article, we aimed to investigate the effects of physiological changes during pregnancy on the pharmacokinetic properties of the drug and the interactions of drugs, nutrients, and nutritional elements