Pregnancy : antidepressants associated with psychiatric disorders in the child

ShmelevaNatalie/Epictura

Published the 08.09.2017 to 12h21

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Keywords :

grossesseantidépresseurtroubles mental

Antidepressants are not part of the prohibited drugs during pregnancy, but their decision is raising concern. And it is difficult to navigate between the different studies that evaluate the risks associated with the treatments.
The researchers are studying, in particular, their impact on possible heart defects of the child, and on the risk of developing autism spectrum disorders. Without that their conclusions agree.

A new study, published in the BMJ, was conducted by the university of Aarhus (Denmark). And the results are not reassuring. They show that antidepressants would have an impact on the children. They would have a higher risk of developing psychiatric disorders, not just autism.

The risk almost doubled

The study was conducted on nearly one million children born between 1998 and 2012. Among them, more than 32,000 have developed a psychiatric disorder. By linking these data to the medicines, they managed to find an association.

They distinguished between the women treated continuously, before and during the pregnancy, those processed before and which had been interrupted by learning that they were pregnant. A third group was comprised of women who had started to take antidepressants during their pregnancy.

It is for these last that the risk of developing a psychiatric disorder was the most important in a child : 14.5% in comparison to a risk of only 8% in children whose mothers had never taken antidepressants. Children whose mothers have not stopped their treatment have a risk equal to 13.6 %, and those whose mothers stopped the medication a little lower : 11.5 per cent.