Many obstetricians recommend that pregnant women take iron supplements. If your obstetrician has made such a recommendation, you may be taking your iron as part of a prenatal vitamin, or you may have been prescribed a separate iron supplement. Either way, it's not uncommon for iron supplements to cause or worsen nausea during pregnancy.
Iron Needs
During pregnancy, your needs for iron are greater than when you're not pregnant. Women generally need about 18 mg of iron each day; their needs increase to 27 mg per day during pregnancy, note Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz in their book "You: Having A Baby." The reason you need iron is to help produce red blood cells. Since your blood volume increases by around 50 percent during pregnancy, your red blood cell synthesis also increases significantly.
Iron Deficiency
You're not the only one producing red blood cells during pregnancy -- your developing baby is also building up a supply of blood. This means that the baby pulls iron from your body to fulfill its needs. If you become iron deficient -- generally the result of getting too little iron from a combination of food and a supplement -- you'll start to experience symptoms of anemia, which results from a lack of sufficient red blood cells. Anemia can cause fatigue and weakness and your doctor can detect it with a blood test.
Supplements and Nausea
Because it's easy to prevent anemia in pregnant women by ensuring that they're getting plenty of iron, most obstetricians prescribe iron supplements. Unfortunately, iron can further slow down and irritate an already upset digestive tract. Most women have some degree of digestive difficulty during pregnancy and iron supplements exacerbate the problem. As such, it's quite common to feel nauseated after taking your iron supplement, explain Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel in their book "What To Expect When You're Expecting."
Solutions
If you experience nausea after your iron supplement, try breaking the supplement into two or three parts and taking it at different times of day. As long as you're taking the whole prescribed supplement each day, it doesn't matter whether you take it all at once or space it out. Also, some women are more sensitive to the iron in one supplement as compared to another. If you continue to have nausea symptoms, talk to your doctor about changing your iron supplement to a different kind or brand.
References
- "You: Having A Baby"; Michael Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet Oz, M.D.; 2009
- "What to Expect When You're Expecting"; Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel; 2008
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