“I have a baby thanks to heparin”
Heparin saves millions of lives every year. And an example is that of Monica, who managed to complete her third pregnancy with this medicine.
Mónica Rodriguez Núñez
My name is Mónica and I have 3 children. I had the first two with no problem and got pregnant with a third..well at first everything went well but then at around 24 weeks during a scan we discovered that the foetus had died.
The doctors said it was a problem with the coagulation of the umbilical cord and the placenta... and that had caused the foetus to die. They said that if I wanted to get pregnant again I would need heparin treatment during the whole of the pregnancy.
Dr. Bernardo Romero, cardiac surgeon Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital
As has occurred many times in medicine and science, heparin was an accidental discovery but it turned out to be a transcendental molecule in the blood coagulation process. Without it, many of the things that are common in medicine and surgery today would not have happened.
Mónica Rodriguez Núñez
In the end we decided to try for another baby, despite the risk that it could happen again, and from the moment I knew I was pregnant...from that day on I had to inject heparin every night for the remaining 8 months...
I tried to make sure the other children didn't see me because...well, it’s a bit weird that you have to inject yourself...but anyway, when they found out later out on... because in the end they did end up seeing me...well it was like the medication that would help the baby to live and that was it.
Dr. Bernardo Romero, cardiac surgeon Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital
It is absolutely every day that heparin saves lives, just in our work centre...every day we operate on three patients that we wouldn't be able to without heparin...multiply three by five, five by four, four by twelve and so on, in all the cardiac surgery services around the world...the number you’d get would surprise you!
Mónica Rodriguez Núñez
So yes, I have a baby thanks to heparin. A real little cutie pie! Hahaha! He's so cute...you can imagine, the third one, with two older siblings..
Related stories
Despite being a centenary drug, heparin remains as one of the essential drugs of medicine and especially of modern surgery but, in addition, possible applications in malaria, cancer or fertility are being investigated.
The use of heparin in pregnancy is increasingly common to avoid thromboembolic complications, abortions or delays in fetal growth. In this story, Monica tells us how thanks to heparin, she was able to bring her third pregnancy to term.
Since its foundation in 1975, Bioiberica has been focused on the production of heparin. The company understood that it was an active ingredient indispensable for human health and that it was important to be able to offer the maximum guarantees of safety and traceability.