Taking antidepressants during pregnancy might actually be safer than you think, according to several recent studies. It turns out elements like mental illness genes might be more of a factor than the antidepressants themselves.
One new study from Indiana University found that mothers who took these medications early in their pregnanc ies didn’t increase their children’s chances of developing conditions like autism or ADHD or of smaller fetal growth when placed against other risk factors. Indiana University partnered with researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for the study, which was published Tuesday in JAMA.
The study looked at 1.5 million babies born in Sweden between 1996 and 2012 and data on the country’s antidepressant adult prescriptions, children’s autism and ADHD diagnoses and more.
Study author Brian D’Onofrio looked at siblings born to mothers who took antidepressants during pregnancy compared to those who didn’t, and found the autism rate was similar, Time reports. This means the medications weren’t a huge deal when it came to developing autism and that it was another factor that stood out for the children. As Time says, the findings suggest “that something else in the children’s experience — like their genetics or the environment in which they were raised — played a greater role than the drugs.”
“If you just look at the population as a whole, children born to women who take antidepressants are more likely to be diagnosed with autism than children born to mothers who don’t take them,” D’Onofrio, also the director of clinical training in Indiana University’s department of psychological and brain sciences, told Time. “But when you try to account for all the other factors that could help explain that association, like comparing siblings and looking at the timing of the exposure, the association went away.” The study did find a slightly increased risk of premature birth for children whose moms took the antidepressants compared to those who didn’t.
Another study published in the same edition of JAMA examined more than 35,000 births in Canada and the corresponding rates of autism spectrum disorders in brothers and sisters whose mothers took antidepressants while pregnant and those who didn’t. One of the study authors Dr. Simone Vigod of Women’s College Research Institute came to a similar conclusion as D’Onofrio, that though there was a higher risk of autism for children born to these mothers, that link went away given factors including how serious the mother’s depression was.
“When taking everything together, it’s quite reasonable to say that these are low-risk medications, especially when you consider the potential risk of not taking them for some women,” Dr. Vigod told Time.
Yet another study published in JAMA Pediatrics indicated studies surrounding antidepressants and autism are difficult to analyze, given the differences in how they look at topics “like a mother’s depression and environmental factors,” Time reports.
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Antidepressants Don’t Increase Autism, ADHD Risk in Pregnancy, Studies Say originally appeared on usnews.com
