Earlier this year, when Emily Chodos was about 25 weeks into her pregnancy, she woke up one night feeling horrible.
“My hands were tremoring, my heart racing, ” recalls Chodos, who lives near New Haven, Conn. She couldn’t take a deep breath. “I’d never felt so out of control of my body.”
She ended up paging her obstetrician’s office at 4 a.m., and one of the midwives in the practice, after listening to her symptoms, said, “It sounds like you’re having a panic attack.”
Chodos was advised to take an antianxiety medication — Xanax. “I was afraid to take it, as a pregnant woman,” Chodos says. But she was miserable, so eventually decided to take the medicine that night.
Chodos, who is a nurse, knew that there are concerns about drugs like Xanax and other medications its class— benzodiazepines.
Studies completed decades ago suggested a risk of birth defects from these drugs, but data from more recent studies have shown no clear evidence of an increase. There are remaining questions, researchers say, about whether prenatal exposure to the drugs can influence behavior. To read more from Allison Aubrey, click here.