Has anyone ever had a bad experience with Methyldopa? -

I was prescribed this medicine because I had hypertension during pregnancy and did fine on it, I guess. When trying to conceive again, I asked if I should be put on it and the doctor said yes. Within 4 mo., instead of becoming pregnant, I developed drug induced lupus or DILE. I stopped the drug myself, without doctor s permission while seeing a Rheaumatologist and my blood work normalized. A few months later, I had my gallbladder removed and they said that my liver had been damaged as well. I asked another doctor once, if I had drug induced hepatitis, he said the only way to find out is to do another liver biopsy, which I m not doing. Has anyone else ever had problems with this drug? I since refuse to take any drugs, I just hope that it didn t harm my baby when I was pregnant. (She s now 4 and very healthy....)

Yes . My mother. She has a lot of autoimmune problems that coincided with being put on methyldopa...thrombocytopenia and haemolytic anaemia. The haemolytic anaemia has not improved much despite her discontinuation and it seems methyldopa has given her quot;cross reactive antibodiesquot; which makes blood matching very difficult ...three times she has had a real problem with this anaemia 1) It precipitated heartfailure 2) It acted up just before her femoral bypass for her gangarenous toes but they were able to transfuse and 3) it dramatically returned after the failure of her bypass graft and the spreading of her gangarene upwards. She was really lucky cos her heart began to fail again so that amputation was not possible and basically they were gonna let the gangarene take its course and leave her die until she responded to heroic measures of an illoprost infusion and a nitroglycerin patch on the foot which improved her gangarene and her heartfailure enough to allow amputation under epidural anaesthesia. Aldomet is a really really old drug and I think they use it in pregnancy mainly because experience supports it not causing birth defects ....the newer drugs can t really be tested for ethical reasons. There is a book called Martindale the extra pharmacopia and its a good source on drugs. The actual number of cases of hemolytic anaemia reported is only 40 world wide ( I never looked up lupus at the time) which seems to be really quot;underreportingquot; and the doctors seemed to disregard it as the causative agent initially. It was only when I suggested withdrawing it before the femoral bypass and her hemoglobin improved did they believe it was the cause. The drug allows immune complexes to form in the blood to quot;selfquot; and this would cause inflammation/destruction I m not sure about this but in some autoimmune disorders eg Guillian Barre and Myasthenia Gravis, they use a form of dialysis called plasmaphoresis to intermittently reduce circulating antibodies in the blood. Also, and again I m not sure you could apply this safely or that it is relevant, but a monoclonal antibody preparation, rituximab I think, is often used to clear out the body of self reacting antibodies before people receive second/third kidney transplants. What I m saying is maybe there is a way of limiting the immune complexes caused by methyldopa that your doctor could research to reduce your symptoms. Ask him. But I guess it d have to be safe to do about the baby- I doubt it harmed her as its the drug of choice in pregnancy so I guess it mightn t be found to be harmful in practise. Also, I understand that exposure to any antigenic substance in utero, the time period when B cells are taught to recognise self from nonself in the thymus gland usually results in a lack of immune response to the antigen..i.e. if your baby was exposed to an infection in utero then it could never mount an immune response to this infection in life as it would consider the bug to be self- therefore if it was exposed to methyldopa in utero it seems likely it wouldn t generate an immune response in later life like the one you experienced:) Hope this helps