Antidepressants Rated Low Risk in Pregnancy | Gainesville.com | The Gainesville Sun | Gainesville,Fla.
June 28. 2007 6:01AM
aking an antidepressant like Prozac may increase a pregnant woman’s risk of having a baby with a birth defect, but the chances appear remote and confined to a few rare defects, researchers are reporting today.
The findings, appearing in two studies in The New England Journal of Medicine, support doctors’ assurances that antidepressants are not a major cause of serious physical problems in newborns.
But the studies did not include enough cases to adequately assess risk of many rare defects; nor did they include information on how long women were taking antidepressants or at what doses. The studies did not evaluate behavioral effects either; previous research has found that babies suffer withdrawal effects if they have been exposed to antidepressants in the womb, and that may have implications for later behavior.
“These are important papers, but they don’t close the questions of whether there are major effects” of these drugs on developing babies, said Dr. Timothy Oberlander, a developmental pediatrician at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in the studies. “There are many more chapters in this story yet to be told.”
In both studies, researchers interviewed mothers of more than 9,500 infants with birth defects, including cleft palate and heart valve problems. They found that mothers who remembered being on antidepressants like Zoloft, Paxil or Prozac while pregnant were at no higher risk for most defects than a control group of women who said they had not taken antidepressants.
There were a few exceptions. One of the studies, led by Carol Louik of Boston University and financed in part by the drug makers GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis, found that use of Paxil was associated with an increased risk of a rare heart defect, which the company had previously reported.
The other study, led by Sura Alwan of the University of British Columbia, found that use of antidepressants increased the risk of craniosynostosis, a condition in which the bones in the skull fuse prematurely. Rare gastric and neural tube defects may also be more common in babies exposed to the medications, the studies suggested.
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