Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Parental SSRI usage and Autism risks...

When it comes to Autism we are always looking for an answer. I wrote a book a few years ago called, Painting the Spectrum Gold, which investigated different areas of Autism research. Here is an excerpt from that book. It is on a study that was done on antidepressant use by mothers and fathers prior to and during pregnancy. Here is a look at that chapter…

Chapter 14

“A Swedish study done from 2001 to 2007 investigated a link between Autism and mothers OR fathers who took antidepressants during their pregnancies or before.

The researchers involved were:
Dr. Dheeraj Rai
Dr. Brian Lee
Dr. Christina Dalman
Dr. Jean Golding
Dr. Glyn Lewis
Dr. Cecilia Magnusson

Said study consisted of 4429 children with Autism (1828 with an intellectual disability and 2601 without) and 43277 age and sex matching control children. To make this work they matched up each Autistic child with 10 control children. They were primarily looking for a correlation between autistic children and their mothers or fathers taking SSRI’s and mothers who listed depression on their pre-birth paperwork.

Other than a solid Autism diagnosis these researchers also used the following to come to their conclusions, based on their association with Autism:
Maternal Age
Paternal Age
Family Income
Highest level of education by either parent
Highest occupation class of either parent
Maternal region of birth
Parental smoking
Maternal diabetes or hypertension
Apgar Score at birth

An interesting point to take in is that during their research they discovered that 70% of mothers were prescribed antidepressants during their pregnancy and this trend has been climbing since 1995. In the end, there were clear (yet somewhat confusing) results.

Of the parents and children looked at, there’s no evidence of a link between paternal SSRI usage raising the risk of Autism. There is, however, a significant correlation between maternal depression and Autism. It seems that a depressed mother raises the risk of her child developing Autism by 60%. The confusing part is that there was no correlation found between maternal SSRI usage and an Autism risk.

Picture Courtesy of Thebmj.com

It is worth mentioning that one California study done years before had opposite findings. It is acknowledged that the difference in findings is linked to the vast difference in the number of individuals used in the study.”


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