Recent research adds to medical literature indicating potential risks to newborns from pregnant women using antidepressants. Citizens Commission on Human Rights calls on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to review the research and issue updated guidance.
Many pregnant women choose to stop using antidepressants during their pregnancy for reasons that include avoiding the risk of potential harms to their baby from the drugs. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) calls on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct an urgent review of recent research concerning those harms and issue updated guidance to health care professionals and the public in an FDA Drug Safety Communication.
Expectant mothers who continue taking antidepressants incur the risks of a number of potential harms to their newborns, according to recent research. A 2022 comprehensive analysis of data from over 45,000 babies found that pregnant women who used antidepressants had greater risks of premature birth, lower birth weight, and neonatal hospitalization for their newborns than pregnant women who quit the drugs.
The study also found that the risk of their newborns experiencing withdrawal symptoms was more than doubled in women who continued their antidepressants. Those symptoms include excessive crying, irritability, jitteriness, feeding problems, respiratory distress, and hypoglycemia.
Pregnant women’s use of antidepressants can negatively affect brain development in their children and increase the risk of certain birth defects and miscarriage. Fetal exposure to antidepressants, especially during the first trimester of pregnancy, is associated with an increased risk of fetal death, including stillbirth.
“In light of a growing body of recent research indicating greater risks of serious negative outcomes to babies from women taking SSRI and SNRI antidepressants during pregnancy, the FDA should conduct an urgent review of these studies’ results and issue an update to health care professionals and the public reflecting these risks,” said Anne Goedeke, president of the CCHR National Affairs Office.
“Prescribers have an obligation to fully disclose to their pregnant patients the risks to their babies of taking antidepressants during pregnancy, as well as discuss evidence-based, non-drug alternatives,” she added.
In a new study, researchers found that pregnant women who had stopped using antidepressants and who did not have severe mental health conditions faced no greater risk of psychiatric hospitalizations, mental health outpatient visits, self-harm, suicide, death from any cause, or taking sick leave compared to women who continued to use the drugs during pregnancy.
The prescribing of antidepressants was called into question by a 2022 study which found that the theory of a chemical imbalance in the brain – a lack of the brain chemical serotonin – causing depression had no scientific basis. If a lack of serotonin is not the cause of depression, then antidepressants prescribed to increase the availability of serotonin in the brain are fixing a problem that does not exist.
WARNING: Anyone who wants to stop taking an antidepressant is cautioned to do so only under the supervision of a physician because of the risk of potentially dangerous withdrawal symptoms or other complications.