Mom's Antidepressant Use Poses Little Danger to Baby

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To complicate matters further, yet another study found that pregnant women who discontinued their antidepressant medication were five times more likely to relapse into depression than women who continued with the medication.

Women of reproductive age have the highest prevalence of major depressive disorders, with experts estimating that about one in 10 will experience a bout of major or minor depression sometime during pregnancy or the postpartum period.

The first study, conducted by Louik's team of Boston researchers, looked at almost 10,000 infants with birth defects and close to 6,000 infants without birth defects. The researchers wanted to see if there was an association between defects that had been previously linked to SSRIs and the use of these drugs by mothers during their first trimester of pregnancy.

Overall, SSRI use was not associated with significantly increased risks of craniosynostosis (when connections between skull bones close prematurely), omphalocele (when intestines or other abdominal organs protrude from the navel) or heart defects.

There were, however, associations between maternal use of Zoloft (sertraline) and omphalocele and septal defects (defects in the walls that separate the chambers of the heart) and between Paxil and defects that interfere with blood flow to the lungs.

But even if a certain drug increased rates by a factor of four, the risk of having a child affected by the problem would still be less than 1 percent, the researchers said.

The study was funded by grants from the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, as well as drug companies Aventis, Sanofi Pasteur and GlaxoSmithKline (maker of Paxil).

A second study, this time conducted by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, found that the use of SSRIs during the first trimester of pregnancy was not associated with any increased risks of most categories of birth defects, including congenital heart defects.