Cocaine use in pregnant women in a large public hospital.

Cocaine has been reported to be associated with several pregnancy complications such as abruptio placentae, an increase in the incidence of low birthweight infants, and congenital malformations in the newborn. With the increasing frequency of cocaine abuse of women of childbearing age in the United States, clinicians can reasonably be expected to encounter increasing numbers of pregnant women who use cocaine. The exact prevalence of cocaine use during pregnancy is not known. In the present series of 102 pregnant women, the prevalence of cocaine use was 9.8%, with a 95% confidence interval of 3.9 to 15.7%. There was one mother who had an abruptio placentae and there was one infant who had a congenital malformation among the ten women with a history of cocaine use during pregnancy. The mean birthweight was 3180 +/- 380 gm for infants born to mothers who used cocaine compared with 3250 +/- 422 gm (p = NS) for the infants born to mothers who did not use cocaine. A significant number of pregnant women in our population use cocaine during pregnancy.