Aripiprazole and pregnancy: a case report and literature review.

Despite the onset or relapse of psychotic disorders during pregnancy being relatively rare clinical events, they impact devastatingly on the well-being of the mother-infant pair.1 Indeed, women with schizophrenia are significantly more likely to have placental abruption, to give birth to infants in the lowest weight population decile, and to have children with cardiovascular congenital anomalies, even fatal.1Y3 These women also are likely to experience severe difficulties with parenting, to induce early developmental vulnerability in the children,4 and thus, to lose their custody.5 For these reasons, the necessity may exist to start or continue psychotropic treatment during pregnancy. Although second-generation antipsychotics have become first-line agents in treating both bipolar and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, 6 data on their reproductive safety are sparse,7 this being especially true for those of the medications most recently introduced into the market.8 Hence, we report the case of a patient treated with aripiprazole during late pregnancy, without any detectable gestational complication. We also searched published information on related investigations. Medical literature published in English (1980YJanuary 2011) was identified using MEDLINE/ PubMed, TOXNET, EMBASE, and The Cochrane Library. Search terms (variously combined) were as follows: pregnancy, second-generation (atypical) antipsychotics, neuroleptics, and aripiprazole. Four case reports were recognized.