The Effects of Prenatal Antidepressant Exposure on Depression and Anxiety in Children
Open Access
- Author:
- Hall, Deirdre
- Area of Honors:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Jenae Marie Neiderhiser, Thesis Supervisor
Jeff M Love, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Prenatal antidepressants
Child mental health outcomes
Adolescent depression
Adolescent anxiety - Abstract:
- During pregnancy, many women deal with anxiety or depression and must decide whether they will continue to take antidepressants while pregnant. When making this decision, mothers must consider what effect antidepressants have on a developing fetus. Little is known about the mental health outcomes in children who were prenatally exposed to antidepressants. To this point, studies have not shown clearly that maternal antidepressant use during pregnancy is predictive of the development of ADHD or autism in exposed children. The same is true of depression and anxiety. The current study used a longitudinal adoption design to examine child mental health outcomes at age 11 years for children whose mothers used antidepressants during pregnancy. Because the children in this study were adopted by genetically unrelated parents at birth, this study is uniquely able to separate environmental factors that influence child mental health development from genetic and other factors, including maternal depression and antidepressant exposure. When the children were eleven years old, their adoptive mothers and fathers rated the child’s anxious and depressive symptoms. These ratings were used to examine if there was a significant difference in anxiety/depression scores between children of mothers who were taking antidepressants during pregnancy, mothers who were diagnosed with anxiety or depression but were not medicated during pregnancy, and mothers who were not on antidepressants and were not diagnosed with anxiety or depression. The results found no significant differences between these groups, suggesting that antidepressants did not create an increased risk of anxiety or depression in children who were prenatally exposed to them.