WASHINGTON – Nearly every woman takes a medication at some point during pregnancy. Yet there’s disturbingly little easy-to-understand information about which drugs pose a risk to her baby, and what to do about it.

Need some pain relief? In the fine print is the warning that painkillers like Advil aren’t for the third trimester. Left unsaid is whether to worry if you took them earlier.

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Pregnant women often turn to the Internet for answers, but if their questions are about drugs, the online lists are likely to vary widely from site to site, a recent study discovered. Reuters

An awful cold? Don’t panic if you used decongestant pills, but doctors advise a nasal spray in early pregnancy.

And don’t abandon antidepressants or epilepsy medicines without talking to your doctor first. Some brands are safer during pregnancy than others — and worsening depression or seizures aren’t good for a mom-to-be or her baby.

“To come off of those medications is often a dangerous thing for the pregnancy itself,” warns Dr. Sandra Kweder of the Food and Drug Administration. “They need information on what to expect, how to make those trade-offs.”

A new study shows how difficult that information is to come by.

Women often turn to the Internet with pregnancy questions. But researchers examined 25 pregnancy-related websites and found no two lists of purportedly safe drugs were identical. Twenty-two products called safe on one site were deemed risky on another.

Worse, specialists couldn’t find evidence to back up safety claims for 40 percent of the drugs listed, said Cheryl Broussard of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led the recent study.

“The reality is that for most of the medications, it’s not that they’re safe or not that’s the concern. The concern is that we just don’t know,” she said.

Broussard experienced some of that confusion during her own two pregnancies — when different doctors handed over different lists of what was safe to use.

It’s a growing dilemma. The CDC says medication use during the first trimester — especially vulnerable for birth defects because fetal organs are forming — has jumped 60 percent in the last three decades. Plus, women increasingly are postponing pregnancy until their 30s, even 40s, more time to develop a chronic health condition before they’re expecting.

The CDC is beginning a Treating for Two program to explore how to get better information, and the FDA plans to revamp prescription drug labels with more details on what’s known now. But people want an easy answer — use it or don’t — and for many drugs, they won’t get one anytime soon.

“Women agonize over it,” said Dr. Christina Chambers of the University of California, San Diego. She helps direct California’s pregnancy risk information hotline that advises thousands of worried callers every year.

Some drugs pose particular birth-defect risks. For example, the FDA requires versions of the acne drug isotretinoin, first marketed as Accutane, to be sold under special tight controls. Similarly, last year the FDA said women who want to use a new weight-loss drug, Qsymia, need testing first to be sure they’re not pregnant.

Other medications are considered safe choices. Obstetricians say pregnant women need a flu shot, for example. A recent massive study in Denmark offered reassurance that taking the anti-nausea drug Zofran for morning sickness won’t hurt the baby.

But many drug labels bear little if any details about pregnancy. Drugmakers shy from studying pregnant women, so it can take years for safety information to accumulate. Moreover, the CDC says 1 in 33 babies has some type of birth defect regardless of medication use. It can be hard to tell if a drug adds to that baseline risk.

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