Dr Ha reviews the key points from her presentation on fertility, pregnancy, and breastfeeding for patients with inflammatory bowel disease, which she delivered at the Advances in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases regional meeting.

Christina Ha, MD, is a gastroenterologist and specialist in inflammatory bowel disease at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, my name is Christina Ha. I'm from the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. I'm here at AIBD regionals, and I spoke about pregnancy in IBD. And the key takeaways from my talk were, number one, it's most important to get our women of childbearing age into a stable remission, because active disease, not the medications, are what impact fertility the most.

The medications that are known to be safe during pregnancy should be continued throughout all three trimesters of pregnancy, and the vast majority of them can be continued during breastfeeding. However, there are unknowns. And where the unknowns are, are some of our newer agents, like the JAK inhibitors and the S1Ps. We don't have enough safety data, longitudinally, to really comment on their use during pregnancy and breastfeeding. So for right now, the JAK inhibitors and the S1Ps, we should avoid, as much as possible, during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

But most importantly, there are plenty of resources out there, such as the IBD Parenthood Project, as well as registry, such as the PIANO registry, where we'll continue to learn, and hopefully, talk more about the safety of these newer agents.

And if there's any take home point is, uncontrolled disease is associated with the greatest risks during pregnancy. Not only of preterm birth, low birth weight, but also spontaneous abortions and other complications. So just reinforce that with your patients. Refer to the great resources, and control their disease activity for healthy babies.