Autism - Taking Anti depressients delinked

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Taking antidepressants during pregnancy doesn’t appear to raise a child’s risk of autism, once other factors that could influence the risk are taken into account, two new studies suggest.

Two separate research teams suspected that those earlier findings might have been flawed if all the different factors that contribute to autism hadn’t been weeded out, so they set to work on more detailed analyses. One team focused on a set of Canadian children, while the other evaluated a group of Swedish children.

Vigod and her team reviewed almost 36,000 Canadian children, just over 2,800 of whom were exposed to antidepressants in the womb. About 2 percent of the kids exposed to antidepressants were diagnosed with autism.

The analysis included matching moms who took antidepressants against those who didn’t based on a series of 500 different variables in their life and health, Vigod said.

The researchers also compared siblings born with antidepressant exposure against brothers or sisters with no exposure in the womb. They also compared the babies of moms who stopped antidepressant use before pregnancy against those whose mothers continued using and those who never took the medications.

Another team performed a similar evaluation of more than 1.5 million children born in Sweden. These researchers performed the sibling comparison and the comparison between mothers conducted in the other study. But they also did an analysis considering whether the children’s fathers had taken antidepressants during pregnancy.

“If that was associated with the problems in the offspring, it couldn’t be due to the exposure during pregnancy, but rather due to factors that lead either parent to have depression and use the medication,” explained senior study author Brian D’Onofrio. He’s a professor of developmental psychopathology at Indiana University Bloomington.

Both teams came to the same conclusion -- the increased risk of autism disappeared when all other factors were taken into account. D’Onofrio’s team also found that a pregnant woman’s antidepressant use was not related to an increased risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in her children.