Stop don’t pop that antidepressant in your mouth, you are pregnant!! An expert warns that certain well-accepted antidepressants if consumed in early pregnancy may double the risk of the foetus developing a defect in the heart.
The anti depressant study claims
An expert has extended the warning that some common antidepressants if taken during the early pregnancy term doubles the risk of a heart defect in a new born child.
The Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor i.e. the SSRI called paroxetine, has shown a risk to babies according to the evidence collected states Professor Stephen Pilling of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
Smoking, alcohol and anti-depressants
The main focus of the people is to advice against alcohol and smoking during pregnancy but antidepressants are never blamed in a similar manner. His recent study insists that one remembers that the antidepressants carry similar risks.
As he stated “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.”
The study
The rewriting will be done keeping in mind the heart defects at birth that may be caused by these antidepressant medications. Pilling affirms that generally it is seen that about two in 100 children face the risk of being born with a heart defect if the mother is taking an antidepressant. The chances increase to four in a 100 if the mother takes an SSRI antidepressant during early pregnancy.
Reports show that in the women of child bearing age, the SSRIs are taken by nearly one out of six. It’s better if the women who suffer from mild to moderate depression stay away from the SSRI. This was done under the Panorama programme and the experts collected data from about 8 moms who had given birth to babies with severe heart defects. Almost all of them had consumed the Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor during their early pregnancy days. Pilling insistently says that the paroxetine in the early term of pregnancy ‘suggests there is a risk’.
He insisted that women suffering from moderate and mild depression who become pregnant while they were taking the drug exposed themselves to an ‘unnecessary risk’.
Reacting to this talk about the drug, Lundbeck, the manufacturer of one of the SSRIs, Citalopram, gave a statement to the dailies ,vehemently stating that this group of anti depressants “does not appear to be associated with an increased risk of major fetal malformations“.
The manufacturers insist that a women suffering from depression may expose the baby to more risk than the anti depressant.
