Jennifer Ames, PhD, from Kaiser Permanente and lead author of the new study said, “Our latest findings are good news for women managing psychiatric conditions such as depression and anxiety while pregnant and are consistent with a growing body of research that’s trying to better disentangle the separate relationships of the mother’s SSRI treatment and psychiatric indications during pregnancy with child neurodevelopment”.
‘Autism risk increases with maternal depression, but not with antidepressants consumption.’
Researchers used data from the Study to Explore Early Development (SEED) to analyze the development of thousands of children born across the US between 2003 and 2011 into three groups: those with ASD (1,367 children); with DD (1,750 children); or healthy population controls (1,671 children).
About a third of mothers in this study had a psychiatric condition before or during pregnancy, and about a quarter of those took SSRIs or other antidepressants.
These findings reported in the Biological Psychiatry indicate the risk of ASD or DD is doubled for children of mothers with a psychiatric disorder but the use of SSRIs is not associated with increased risk.
Though the study is a big relief to pregnant women taking antidepressant medication, it also confirms that maternal psychiatric disorders are associated with increased risk for autism spectrum disorder in the offspring.
Source: Medindia
