Hepatic drug metabolism in pregnancy.

The results of both isolated tissue and whole animal experimentation, whilst showing some unexplored inconsistencies, suggest that late pregnancy is associated with a reduced ability of the liver to metabolise foreign compounds. The mechanism of this reduced capacity and the physiological reason for it are unclear but such change does have implication for therapeutic response in pregnancy. Available results from the limited and often poorly structured studies of drug levels in pregnant women neither prove nor disprove the existence of similar changes in hepatic monooxygenase activity during human pregnancy.