Report from the National Transplantation Pregnancy Registry (NTPR): outcomes of pregnancy after transplantation.

TLDR: Key benefits of the NTPR are the personal contact between registry staff and participants, the wide range of pregnancy-related variables that are analyzed, and the opportunity for health-care providers to obtain information that helps them care for transplant recipients on a case-by-case basis.

Abstract: The NTPR continues to maintain an ongoing active database as a resource for health professionals counseling recipients regarding pregnancy and for recipients themselves to contact the registry and request information. This includes female transplant recipients as well as male recipients who father pregnancies. Recipients who consent are entered into a database; analyses are ongoing, including long-term follow-up of the recipient, the graft and the offspring. The safety of pregnancy for parent and child remains the goal of the registry. Guidelines for counseling recipients proposed in 1976 remain applicable. Recipients should be in general good health and graft function should be stable and ideally rejection free. Comorbid conditions should be well controlled, especially hypertension and diabetes. While these counseling guidelines were formulated for kidney recipients, they may be extrapolated for other organ recipients. Analyses this year included pregnancy outcomes of recipients on newer agents, MMF and sirolimus. It remains unclear whether these adjunctive therapies should be altered for pregnancy. The balance of immunosuppression and the prevention of rejection need to be weighed against the potential for teratogenicity when counseling these recipients inquiring about pregnancy. Although there are periodic reports of recipients with graft dysfunction, rejection or graft loss possibly related to pregnancy events throughout all the organ groups, whether transplanted as adults or as pediatric patients, the majority of pregnancy outcomes reported to the NTPR appear favorable for parent and newborn. Whether recipients should breastfeed remains controversial. Recent reports in the literature as well as NTPR data appear favorable. This represents the last report from our initial established location at Thomas Jefferson University. In January of this year, the registry moved to Temple University School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, Philadelphia, PA. The NTPR remains committed to investigating outcomes of pregnancies reported by centers or self-referrals nationwide. Some of the active issues for the upcoming year include the potential for teratogenicity with combinations of newer agents, incidence of viral hepatitis, risk assessment for pregnancy in female lung recipients, and long-term maternal and pediatric follow-up.