Pregnancy, delivery, and outcome for the child in maternal epilepsy

Summary Purpose: To investigate pregnancy, delivery, and child outcome in an unselected population of women with both treated and untreated epilepsy. Methods: In the compulsory Medical Birth Registry of Norway, all 2,861 deliveries by women with epilepsy recorded from 1999–2005 were compared to all 369,267 nonepilepsy deliveries in the same period. Results: The majority (66%, n = 1900) in the epilepsy group did not use antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) during pregnancy. A total of 961 epilepsy‐pregnancies were exposed to AEDs. Compared to nonepilepsy controls, AED‐exposed infants were more often preterm (p = 0.01), and more often had birth weight