Infants are more likely to display abnormally high blood pressure in the lungs

Jan 18, 2012 15:05 GMT  ·  By
Mothers who use SSRI antidepressants during late pregnancy run a higher risk of giving birth to babies suffering from high blood pressure in the lungs.
   Mothers who use SSRI antidepressants during late pregnancy run a higher risk of giving birth to babies suffering from high blood pressure in the lungs.

A group of investigators in Sweden says that expecting mothers who consume drugs in a class of antidepressant medication known as serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) during late pregnancy run a higher risk of giving birth to babies suffering from high blood pressure in the lungs.

The risk itself is statistically small, the team says, but the condition is nothing to toy with. They say that infants born to mothers who used SSRI medication during pregnancy are 200 percent more likely to develop this condition than their peers, whose mothers did not take this type of antidepressants.

Some of the most commonly-used drugs in this class include citalopram (brand name Celexa), escitalopram (Lexapro), fluoxetine (Prozac), fluvoxamine (Luvox), paroxetine (Paxil), and sertraline (Zoloft), PsychCentral reports.

The exact mechanism through which they influence the fetus is not exactly known at this point, but researchers did find that infants exposed to them in the uterus are more likely to develop a rare disorder known as persistent pulmonary hypertension.

This condition normally occur in 3 out of 1,000 normal births, but researchers found an incidence of 6‰ among mothers who had used SSRI drugs late in the pregnancy. While the study is insufficient to provide a strong recommendation against these chemicals, experts do call on women to be cautious.

Doctors say that persistent pulmonary hypertension usually causes sufferers to breathe very heavily. At the same time, this leads to a host of complications that oftentimes end in heart failure. As such, the condition is very difficult to manage, since it requires constant attention.

This survey included data collected between 1996 and 2007 in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and covers 1,618,255 million births. About 11,000 mothers were on antidepressants during pregnancy. A total of 33 babies were born with PPH, from mothers who took SSRI during late pregnancy.

Of those who used the drugs earlier on, only 32 gave birth to children diagnosed with PPH. The difference is therefore minimal, but sufficient to make researchers call on people for caution.

Details of the new investigation appear in the latest issue of the top scientific publication British Medical Journal (BMJ).