Antidepressants in early pregnancy may harm babies

PanARMENIAN.Net - The risk posed by some popular antidepressants in early pregnancy is not worth taking for women with mild to moderate depression, an expert has warned, according to BBC News.

Professor Stephen Pilling says evidence suggests SSRIs can double the risk of a child being born with a heart defect.

The drugs have been used by up to one in six women of child-bearing age.

Eight mothers under research had babies born with serious heart defects after taking a commonly used SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) antidepressant while pregnant. Currently, prescription guidelines for doctors only warn specifically against taking the SSRI, paroxetine, in early pregnancy.

But Prof Pilling, of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), says that advice is about to be updated.

"The available evidence suggests that there is a risk associated with the SSRIs. We make a quite a lot of effort really to discourage women from smoking or drinking even small amounts of alcohol in pregnancy, and yet we're perhaps not yet saying the same about antidepressant medication, which is going to be carrying similar - if not greater - risks," he said.

Prof Pilling says the guidance will now be re-written to take in to account evidence that the SSRI antidepressants, as a group, are linked to heart defects.

He says the risk of any baby being born with a heart defect is around two in 100; but the evidence suggests if the mother took an SSRI in early pregnancy that risk increases to around four in 100.

According to Prof Pilling, women not suffering from the most severe depression who become pregnant whilst taking the drug are taking an unnecessary risk.

"You've got double the risk. And for women who are mild to moderately depressed, I don't think that those risks, in most cases, are really worth taking" he says.