14 DAY TRIAL // Infants born from mothers who used some of the most common antidepressants during pregnancy are at a higher risk of developing autism than peers whose mothers did not consume the drugs. The link was found to be especially strong for prenatal exposure during the first trimester of pregnancy.
The risk increase was found to be only moderate, but the fact remains that the statistical correlation is fairly clear. Prenatal exposure to common antidepressants – especially early on in the pregnancy – puts the kids at higher risk of developing an autism spectrum disorder.
Some of the most common brand names associated with this connection include Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft. All of these are part of a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI).
Details of the new study were published in the latest online issue of the JAMA/Archives journal Archives of General Psychiatry. The work was conducted specifically to evaluate whether ASD and SSRI had any sort of connection.
The need to study this was prompted by the fact that an increasing number of mothers are taking the drugs while they are pregnant. Researchers behind the new study say that this behavior has not been properly investigated before.
The work was led by Lisa A. Croen, Judith K. Grether, Cathleen K. Yoshida, Roxana Odouli and Victoria Hendrick. “The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has increased over recent years,” they write in the journal entry.
“Use of antidepressant medications during pregnancy also shows a secular increase in recent decades, prompting concerns that prenatal exposure may contribute to increased risk of ASD,” they add, quoted by PsychCentral.
In order to analyze the connection, the team analyzed data obtained by experts with the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in northern California, who conducted the large-scale Childhood Autism Perinatal Study.
Datasets covered about 298 ASD children and their mothers, and a total of 1,507 control subjects, plus their parents. It was determined that the mothers of ASD kids were more likely than mothers of children in the research group to have had a antidepressant prescription during pregnancy.
“Although the number of children exposed prenatally to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in this population was low, results suggest that exposure, especially during the first trimester, may modestly increase the risk of ASD,” the authors explain.
“We recommend that our findings be considered as preliminary and treated with caution, pending results from further studies designed to address the very complex question of whether prenatal exposure to SSRIs may be etiologically linked to later diagnoses of ASDs in offspring,” they conclude.