Developmental Outcomes of Children with Prenatal Exposure to SSRIs

The known risk for major depressive disorder (MDD) among women of childbearing age and the availability of relatively safe selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have raised concerns about how prenatal SSRI exposure affects children. Although no increases in major congenital malformations or cognitive and neurobehavioral functions have been found in studies of children with such exposure, controls in those studies were children of nondepressed mothers. In this nonrandomized study, 31 children whose mothers were diagnosed with MDD and treated with an SSRI during pregnancy were compared with 13 children whose mothers had MDD but did not take SSRIs during pregnancy.

All women received supportive psychotherapy. Of the women receiving SS…