LONDON Safer drugs to treat epileptic women during pregnancy are urgently needed because some treatments can triple the risk of birth defects and behavioral and developmental problems, doctors said.

Children whose mothers take the drugs are more likely to suffer from seizures, low blood sugar levels and poor feeding from drug withdrawal and malformations such as cleft palate and congenital heart defects.

But stopping the treatment for the nervous system disorder during pregnancy is not an option because of the risk of seizures and death.

"There are already some safer drugs available but there is a need for further development of better drugs," Dr. John Dean, a clinical geneticist at Aberdeen University in Scotland, who

headed the research team, told Reuters.

"This study highlights the high frequency of later childhood complications associated with maternal epilepsy and its treatment and emphasizes the need for appropriate counselling."

Dean and his colleagues, whose research is published in the *****Journal of Medical Ethics****, assessed the health and development of 255 children in Scotland whose mothers took anti-epilepsy drugs during pregnancy between 1976 and 2000 and 38 children whose mothers did not.

****** More Problems With Older Drugs *******

Most of the youngsters involved in the study were exposed to the older anti-epileptic drugs and had more health problems than the children whose mothers had not taken them.

Almost a third of the youngsters had either abnormalities that required surgery or developmental delays.

Twenty percent had withdrawal symptoms, 31 percent had childhood medical problems and 20 percent suffered behavior disorders.

Women on combination therapy had a higher risk of having a child with problems than expectant mothers taking a single drug. Higher doses were also linked to an increased risk.

Dean advised epileptic women who want to start a family to discuss with their doctors the possibility of changing treatments to lessen the risk.

But he added that not all women will be able to change their treatments because newer drugs do not work for all types of epilepsy.

Women could also take folic acid, which has been shown to reduce the risk of neural tube disorder such as spina bifida, before pregnancy because the older drugs are known to interfere with its metabolism.

"It may be that folic acid will reduce the risk (of problems) but no one has done a study to show that," he said, adding that there would be no harmful effects.

Epilepsy, which affects about 40 million people worldwide, is caused by excessive local stimulation of the brain. It can strike at any age. Most patients are treated with a cocktail of drugs.