Drug use and ionizing radiation in early pregnancy. Risk assessment and postpartum results

: The influence of medical drugs and X-rays upon early pregnancy causes problems of great responsibility for the physician. He is supposed to grant optimum consultation to the anxious women who finally have to decide to carry on their pregnancy or not. This topic is difficult to value as controlled prospective studies are not practicable for ethical reasons, and the results of animal experiments are rarely transferable to human medicine. In this paper the facts and data of our consulting activities are summarized from April 1985 to May 1986 in the sense of a prospective study. Over all 64 consultations were performed in these 14 months, up to now 30 women have been delivered of a newborn. The procedure and the principles of our consultations and the postnatal results are presented below.