Mothers who use antidepressants during pregnancy give birth to children at risk of anxiety disorders, reports the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Scientists from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, the University of Oslo and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (Canada) have shown that antidepressants, taken during pregnancy, increase the risk of anxiety disorders in children and have a greater impact on their behavioral changes than their mother’s disease.
Researchers watched the development of almost 14,5 thousand. children from the fetal life until the age of 3.
They concluded that babies whose mothers used antidepressants during pregnancy had a higher level of anxiety. However, they found no correlation between the use of antidepressants and other behavioral changes in terms of emotional reactivity, somatic complaints, sleep disturbances, difficulty concentrating, or aggression severity.
Certain behavioral changes also correlated with maternal depression, but the effect of the disease was smaller than that of antidepressants.
The fact that a large proportion of the studied children were siblings allowed us to conclude that the behavioral changes were independent of genetic and environmental factors.
According to scientists, antidepressants can cause behavioral problems in a baby by modifying the level of serotonin in the fetal brain, which affects its development. The same happens in the case of depression, which causes an additional increase in the secretion of cortisol (the stress hormone), which also does not remain indifferent to the brain.
The results of this study indicate the need to consider alternative treatments for depression in pregnant women due to the adverse effects of antidepressants on the child’s development. One of such methods may be participation in cognitive behavioral therapy.