Treatment strategies and pregnancy outcomes in antiphospholipid syndrome patients with thrombosis and triple antiphospholipid positivity : a European multicentre retrospective study

Previous thrombosis, diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and triple antiphospholipid (aPL) antibody positivity have recently been found to be independent factors associated to pregnancy failure during conventional therapy in women with antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). This study aimed to assess the effect of various treatment strategies on pregnancy outcomes in women with APS and the risk factors for pregnancy failure. One hundred ninety-six pregnancies of 156 patients diagnosed with APS were analysed: 118 (60.2%) of these had previous thrombosis, 81 (41.3%) were diagnosed with SLE, and 107 (54.6%) had triple aPL positivity. One hundred seventy-five (89.3%) were treated with conventional therapies (low-dose aspirin [LDA] or prophylactic doses of heparin + LDA or therapeutic doses of heparin + LDA), while 21 (10.7%) were prescribed other treatments in addition to conventional therapy. The pregnancies were classified into seven risk profiles depending on the patients’ risk factors – thrombosis, SLE, and triple aPL positivity – and their single, double or triple combinations. It was possible to find significant difference in outcomes correlated to treatments only in the thrombosis plus triple aPL positivity subset, and logistic regression analysis showed that additional treatments were the only independent factor associated to a favourable pregnancy outcome (odds ratio=9.7, 95% confidence interval= 1.1–88.9, p-value<0.05). On the basis of this retrospective study, we found that APS pregnant patients with thrombosis and triple aPL positivity treated with additional therapy had a significant higher livebirth rate with respect to those receiving conventional therapy alone.