The State - News from March 20, 1988

Pregnant women who are treated with a common anti-asthma drug are more likely to have premature or underweight babies than if they had not been treated regularly with the drug, a San Diego physician has found. The oral medication, theophylline, causes three to five times more such problems than occur in women who had their asthma controlled in other ways, said Dr. Michael Schatz of Kaiser Permanente Medical Center. Furthermore, the use of an alternative to regular theophylline--drugs called inhaled bronchodilators--avoids the problems, he said. Schatz reported the results of his six-year study at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology in Anaheim.