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| Newborns of mothers taking antidepressants risk |
STOCKHOLM - Infants of mothers taking antidepressants are more expected to have dangerously hypertension in the lungs, reported to a study published Friday in the British Medical Journal.
Take the so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) - specified Prozac - aft the 20th week of pregnancy more than doubled the risk, the study found.
SSRIs are a class of compounds commonly applied to treat low pressure, anxiousness disorders and some personality disorders.
The study, led by Helle Kieler Center of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for pharmacoepidemiology, looked at 1.6 million single births between 1996 and 2007 in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
In the general population, the number of newborns with the condition was 1.2 in 1000, with a mortality rate of babies with high blood pressure in the lungs of 15 percent.
Newborns of mothers who completed some 17,000 prescriptions of SSRIs before the eighth week of pregnancy showed a slightly increased risk of having the condition.
But for 11 000 pregnant women who took drugs after 20 weeks of their pregnancies, the risk more than doubled.
Even for this group, however, the absolute risk for infants remained fairly low, about three miles, or 0.2 percent, the researchers said.
Kieler, however, suggested that doctors who treat depression in pregnant patients consider a non-drug of the disease.
"As the risk associated with treatment in late pregnancy appears to be more than doubled, we recommend caution when treating pregnant women with SSRIs," the investigators all over.
The drugs tested included fluoxetine, citalopram, paroxetine, sertraline, escitalopram and fluvoxamine. Fluoxetine is better known by the brand name Prozac.
