During the study that had more than 140,000 expecting women as participants, scientists found that taking drugs like Seroxat and Prozac during the 2nd and 3rd trimester increases the possibilities of such disorders significantly.
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Present NHS advice asks pregnant women to stay away from such drugs as they have been found to cause miscarriage and a range of health problems in the unborn child.
The study looked at a database from a Canadian registry of 145,456 newborn children in Quebec, who were followed for an average of six years.
“Our study has established that taking antidepressants during the second or third trimester of pregnancy nearly doubles the risk that the child will be diagnosed with autism by age seven, especially if the mother takes selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, often known by its acronym SSRIs”, said lead author Anick Berard, an expert on pharmaceutical safety during pregnancy at the University of Montreal.
“It is hard to know whether this small increase in risk is due to the medication being taken, to the mood disorder itself, to an overlap in genetic vulnerability or to other factors associated with mood disorders and antidepressant medication”, said Jones, who was not involved in the study. Many researchers say the jump in numbers comes from greater public awareness of the condition, a neurodevelopmental syndrome characterized by altered social interaction, and from changing diagnostic criteria that are catching previously undetected cases.
Here, it must be mentioned that previous studies came up with inconsistent evidence linking the use of antidepressants during pregnancy with autism in kids. That means the chance a women does not have a child with autism is about 97 to 98 percent. The study concludes the subject should be researched further.
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When researchers compared the rates of autism for children born from women with a history of depression who did not take SSRIs to those who did, they found that the babies of SSRI-users were 75 percent more likely to be diagnosed. She, however, added that environment and genetics might have a role to play.
