Case‐control study on occupational exposure to anesthetic gases during pregnancy

Abstract

Information on a possible prenatal effect of maternal occupation as anesthetists or in operating rooms is scarce, and most of the studies are on women who underwent surgery during gestation. Some studies observed an increased risk for spontaneous abortions in women with that occupation. Some identified a risk for infants with congenital defects, while this was not observed by others. However, many of the previous studies have been criticized because of methodological problems.

Here we present the results of a case‐control analysis with the data from the Spanish Collaborative Study of Congenital Malformations (ECEMC), on the possible association between congenital anomalies and maternal occupation as anesthetists or in operating rooms during pregnancy. To generate hypotheses, we analyze 9 selected congenital defects.

We observed ORs with magnitudes over one for eye defects, oral clefts, limb deficiencies and hypospadias. However, after calculation the adjusted ORs by performing multiple logistic regression analyses, the only group of defects that remain statistically associated with this maternal occupation are oral clefts with an OR ${}={}$ 10.41 (CI: 3.48–31.1), $p<{}$ 0.0000. Thus, considering the oral clefts rate in our population and the observed risk value, the absolute risk of women with this occupation during pregnancy for having a child with oral clefts is 1.13%. Nevertheless, as this is the first observation of this association, at this time, we cannot totally exclude that this association may be just by chance. Thus, we think that the observed association must be regarded as hypothetical, to be further analyzed in another large database.