Pregnant women should keep antidepressants -study

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Hormonal changes during pregnancy do
not protect women from depression, and those taking
antidepressants may need to continue despite concerns about
fetal damage, researchers said on Tuesday.

“We found that patients who stopped their antidepressant
during pregnancy were five times more likely to have a return
of depressive symptoms than those patients who had decided to
continue (them) during pregnancy,” said Lee Cohen, a doctor at
Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who led the research.

The relapse rate was about the same as it would be for
nonpregnant women who cut back or stopped using their
antidepressants, the report said.

The study looked at 201 pregnant women between 1999 and
2003 who had suffered from severe depression before conception
and who kept taking their medicine or tried to eliminate or
reduce it out of fear it might hurt the fetus.

Cohen said it appears that “pregnancy does not protect
women against depression during pregnancy” through hormonal and
other biological changes that occur.

The study, published in this week’s Journal of the American
Medical Association, said researchers have not found that
antidepressants lead to major birth defects.

But it said several recent reports have found a possible
tie between some drugs and a heart malformation and some
distress among newborns exposed in the womb.

“The goal of the obstetrician and the psychiatrist is to
use the safest drugs that are effective for the patient,” said
Jennifer Wu, an obstetrician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New
York,

Instead of eliminating antidepressants during pregnancy,
she said, “a better approach would be to reduce medications
down to a single agent and to use the lowest effective dose
possible.”