Maternal infection
The data available on maternal serious infection requiring hospitalisation included two studies both of which focused on anti-TNF-α use in pregnancy. There was a total of 1685 pregnant women in this cohort.18,19 There were 916 women who were treated with biologics during their pregnancy (Table 2) and 453 disease matched control. The studies included in this analysis were Chaparro19 who focused on anti-TNF-α use in IBD and pregnancy and Clowse18 on certolizumab pegol use in CID in pregnancy.
Overall the pooled analysis showed that the treated group had a proportion of serious infection of 4% (95% CI 0.03 to 0.05), while the disease matched group had a proportion of serious infections of 1% (0.00 to 0.02) (Figure S9). There were only 2 studies included in this analysis with a statistical difference in proportions between disease matched compared with disease treated women (p <0.001.; Table S2).