• Posted May 18, 2026

Pregnancy Safe For Women With Myasthenia Gravis, Study Concludes

Women suffering from the muscle weakness disease myasthenia gravis can become pregnant without any ill effects, a new study says.

Pregnancy is not linked with an increased risk of serious flare-ups or worse symptoms for women with myasthenia gravis, researchers reported May 13 in the journal Neurology.

“This is wonderful news for women with myasthenia gravis, as previous small studies had conflicting results and many women choose not to have children due to fear that the disease will get worse during or after pregnancy,” said senior researcher Dr. Anna Rostedt Punga, a professor of clinical neurophysiology at Uppsala University in Sweden.

“It’s reassuring to see that pregnancy did not lead to an increase in serious flare-ups and, for the majority of women, that was also true in the months after birth,” Rostedt Punga said in a news release.

Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease that causes weakness in a person’s voluntary muscles. The disorder can cause drooping eyelids, double vision, slurred speech, trouble chewing and swallowing, and weakness in the neck, arm and leg muscles, researchers said in background notes.

For this new study, researchers tracked 112 Swedish women with myasthenia gravis who had a total 176 pregnancies between 1987 and 2019.

The team compared the rate of hospitalizations for myasthenia gravis among the women in the year before pregnancy versus a year after delivery.

Researchers found that about 11% of participants had at least one hospital admission in the first year after birth, compared with 7% in the year before pregnancy.

Overall, women were not more likely to be hospitalized during pregnancy, researchers concluded.

In addition, women reduced or stopped taking the immunosuppressive drugs they were prescribed for myasthenia gravis in 13 pregnancies, compared to six pregnancies where doses were increased, researchers said.

However, women were five times more likely to have a flare-up after giving birth than prior to pregnancy, researchers found. Medications were started or escalated in 10 pregnancies following delivery, and reduced in none.

"Nearly 90% of women had no hospital admissions related to myasthenia gravis in their first year after birth,” Rostedt Punga said.

“For those who did, it’s important to note that among the 16 women who needed hospitalization during the postpartum period, nine of them, or more than half, had at least one additional pregnancy where they did not need hospitalization, indicating that these disease exacerbations are not a foregone conclusion,” she added.

More information

The National Institutes of Health has more on myasthenia gravis.

SOURCES: American Academy of Neurology, news release, May 13, 2026; Neurology, May 13, 2026