Concerns over whether the use of certain
antidepressant medications during pregnancy led to cardiac defects in the
infants are allayed somewhat by a new study of nearly one million pregnant
women that found no connection.
by John
Tyburski
Copyright © Daily
Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
A new cohort
study that followed just under 950,000 pregnant women enrolled in Medicaid
examined whether there is a connection between the use of selective
serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), drugs that are commonly prescribed to
treat depression, and cardiac defects in liveborn infants. The results of the
study, which found no connection between SSRIs and infant heart problems, were published this week in
the New England Journal of Medicine.
Past
findings and an alert issued in 2005 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
had created concern about using SSRIs like paroxetine (Paxil) and sertraline
(Zoloft) during the first trimester of pregnancy. Experts suspected a link
between right ventricular outflow tract obstruction and ventricular septal
defects and Paxil and Zoloft, respectively.
“I don’t
know if it will completely settle the debate over antidepressants during
pregnancy, but I’m pleased to hear more support for the safety of these medicines
in pregnancy,” Dr. Rebecca Starck, Director of Regional Obstetrics and
Gynecology at the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, told Reuters Health. “I think many
practitioners and obstetricians will be happy to see this study come out.”
Starck was not involved with the study.
The study
was conducted with Medicaid records on subjects of the Medicaid Analytic
eXtract, a larger, nationwide effort, from 2000 through 2007. During these
years, women in the Medicaid program from three months before their last
menstruation through one month after giving birth to a live infant were
followed. Among these women, more than 64,000, or 6.8 percent, used
antidepressants during the first trimester of their pregnancies. In comparison,
approximately 10 to 15 percent of pregnant women in the U.S. are diagnosed with
depression.
“We did not
find any association for any of the antidepressant categories or the individual
drugs we studied,” lead author Dr. Krista Huybrechts of Brigham and Women’s
Hospital in Boston said. “It will be up to individual physicians and women to
determine how much it will sway their opinion one way or the other.”
Looking only
at antidepressant use and cardiac defects in the infants born to the depressed
mothers suggested an almost 25 percent increase of risk associated with SSRI
use. However, once the researchers adjusted their risk model for activities
that depressed women engage in, the association disappeared.
“Women with
depression often have behaviors that tend to increase their risk,” said
Huybrechts. “They tend to have a high use of alcohol, they tend to be smokers
and they use other psychotropic medications that might have some association.”
The authors
of the report did not disclose any potential conflicts of interest or funding
from drug makers.
No comments:
Post a Comment