A child may face an increased risk of developing asthma if your mother experiences depression during pregnancy, especially if she takes antidepressants. This is what a recent study conducted at the University of Aarhus in Denmark suggests.
However, more than 80% of the women in the study who took antidepressants from a new class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) they did not show an increased risk of asthma in the child. I'll tell you all about this study below.
"How maternal depression affects the risk of asthma in children is unknown, but the mechanism could involve hormonal changes or changes in lifestyles", said the study's lead author, Dr. Xiaoqing Liu. "The most important finding of our study is that we found that the use of antidepressants during pregnancy does not increase the risk of asthma in general."
However, the issue is different when the researchers looked only at the older antidepressants, known as antidepressants tricyclics. They found that these drugs were linked to the same level of increased risk for asthma as depression during pregnancy, according to the researchers. In the study, about 8% of the women took the oldest medications.
Depression affects between 7 and 13% of pregnant womenaccording to background information in the study, and the use of antidepressants during pregnancy has increased in recent years. SSRIs are the most commonly prescribed medications for depression.
Liu and her team analyzed the medical records of more than 733.000 Danish children born between 1996 and 2007. More than 21.000 mothers either had a diagnosis of depression or received a prescription for antidepressants while pregnant.
Children born to mothers with depression were 25% more likely to develop childhood asthma, according to the results of the study.
Among the nearly 9.000 children whose mothers were prescribed antidepressants during pregnancy, the children of women who received the oldest antidepressants had a 26% increased risk of developing asthma.
The study does not prove that older antidepressants increased asthma risk, only that there was an association between the two. The researchers noted that tricyclic antidepressants are prescribed for the most severe depression, which had already been linked to asthma in previous research. Additionally, the study only found an association between depression and asthma risk, not a cause-and-effect relationship.
"Tricyclic antidepressants have different pharmacokinetic properties than SSRIs, but the association can be confounded by the underlying severity of the depression," Liu said.
In other words, it could be that the reason for the increased risk of asthma is that mothers taking tricyclic antidepressants already have more severe depression, and that it is depression, not drugs, that contributes to asthma risk.
It is not clear, however, how a mother's depression might contribute to a child's asthma risk. The link can be explained in part by biology, with something that happens during pregnancy, by involving environmental or genetic factors, or all three, Liu explained.
"The researchers also found that depression in parents slightly increases the risk of asthma, suggesting that some kind of environmental or genetic factors could be involved in children," Liu said.
Dr. Jill rabin, an obstetrician and gynecologist with Health Services at North Shore-LIJ Health System in New Hyde Park, New York, commented on this study that any good study raises more questions than answers.
"If you have a parent who is depressed, does the home environment have strife that affects the whole family?"Rabin asked. «Is it that the socio-emotional tone of the house is affecting the baby's respiratory health? Could it be that the parents in this house who are depressed are smokers? "
The study authors adjusted their results to account for mothers who smoked during pregnancy, but did not take into account whether the fathers smoked or other sources of smoke. "Smoking during pregnancy influences the baby's lung development", Rabin pointed out.
However, despite these aftershocks, Rabin also said that the study's findings should not change any woman's decision to treat depression during pregnancy.
"This study raises some interesting questions that deserve further study, but there is no evidence that antidepressants cause asthma." said. "We want women to have their depression treated so that they can function better for themselves, their families and their newborns."
The results of this study have been published in Pediatrics