Hormones raging, scattered emotions, and morning sickness — pregnancy can be a scary time. Many women adopt certain restrictions and habits during the course of a pregnancy for the welfare of their unborn child, whether that is limiting caffeine, listening to classical music, or refraining from heavy lifting. Another maxim that most people seem to agree with is that the less medication you take while pregnant, the better.
JANICE LIU/THE VARSITY
Many believe that drugs, from painkillers to sleep medications, can be harmful for their unborn child, and so they refrain from taking them during pregnancy. And for good reason: there have been numerous studies linking certain medications to impaired fetal development. However, a problem arises when the mother is suffering from an illness that is harmful to the baby as well. Many people don’t regard depression as being a physical illness; however, it is a mental illness that can have a vast array of negative physiological effects on the mother’s body and on the developing fetus. Antidepressants come with a large amount of stigma and many women prefer to avoid them during pregnancy. Recent U of T research suggests that this stigma is unfounded.
A paper published earlier this month in the American Journal of Psychiatry by Dr. Irena Nulman of SickKids Hospital and the University of Toronto shows that there is no difference in intelligence between children whose mothers took antidepressants and those whose mothers left their depression untreated. Although children of healthy mothers (those not afflicted by mental illness) exhibited the highest intelligence, Nulman’s study failed to find an effect of antidepressant medication on children’s intellectual or behavioral outcomes.
The study tracked the long-term outcome of different antidepressants on child neurocognitive development and behavioural abilities. There were four possible conditions for the mother: no depression, depression left untreated, depression treated with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and depression treated with venlafaxine. Nulman’s study was the first to compare the use of antidepressants during pregnancy and child IQ over a extended period of time. The study was conducted using about 200 participants over the span of four to five years, making it much more difficult to carry out than a simple pregnancy-outcome experiment. Nulman notes that in the latter “the results are documented in the delivery room,” making it relatively easy to complete.
In previous studies, researchers reported “neurodevelopmental outcomes as secondary, whereas this study focuses on it as the primary concern,” says Nulman. The interesting thing about this experiment is the fact that there is a condition in which depression is left untreated. “Selective reuptake inhibitors antidepressants have been around for over 26 years and there is a lot of research surrounding them. But these studies fail to separate the effect of the drug and the depression itself,” Nulman explains.
It is important to note that Dr. Nulman’s study found that depression during pregnancy is a high predictor of postpartum depression (80 per cent of untreated mothers went on to suffer from this condition), which can be extremely harmful for the mother, the baby and the family. Also, as supported by a vast field of research in psychology and neuroscience, postpartum depression puts the child at risk for cognitive impairment and psychopathology. Thus, taking antidepressants during pregnancy should not be avoided as they do not seem to have an effect on their child’s IQ in the long term, and are beneficial for both the mother and the child. In fact, the depression itself can turn into a bigger problem if left untreated.
