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Untreated prenatal depression can cause problems with eating, sleeping, exercise, and adherence to prenatal care, all of which are likely to be harmful to mother and fetus. Mild-to-moderate cases often can be treated with psychotherapy (Journal Watch Women's Health May 20 2003), but moderate-to-severe cases usually require antidepressants. In addition, women who discover that they are pregnant while taking antidepressants need to know about the effects that the drugs might already have had, and they must decide whether to discontinue treatment and risk recurrent depression.
To examine the effects of the most commonly used antidepressants, SSRIs, on pregnancy outcomes, researchers prospectively followed 138 healthy, pregnant, nonsmoking women…