Antidepressants During Pregnancy: What Are the Risks?

What is a woman struggling with depression supposed to do when she becomes pregnant?

A study published on Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry tackles the tough decision of deciding to keep taking the medication, or risk harming the fetus.

Roughly six percent of pregnant women are taking antidepressants. The struggle to live with depression or risk your baby's health has plagued women for quite some time.

The latest study included 7,696 pregnant women. Five hundred and seventy of the women suffering from depression were not on medication, and 99 women with depression "were being treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a common class of antidepressants."

What this study found is that women going untreated for depression gave birth to babies that had a reduction in total body growth.

This affected the fetal head growth as well. Those women taking prenatal SSRI also had babies that suffered from a reduced growth of the fetal head, but the overall growth of the body during pregnancy was not affected.

What are the risks for the fetus during pregnancy with antidepressants? Mothers taking antidepressants could have preterm babies, who face higher health risks like respiratory and gastrointestinal disorders.

Not only could these children be born preterm, but according to the authors of the study, reduced fetal head-growth can lead to behavioural problems and psychiatric disorders later on.

However, the risks for the mother may outweigh the risks of the pregnancy, if she discontinues antidepressant medication.

Dr. Sudeepta Varma, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone School of Medicine reported "If we are talking about a woman who can't take care of her health as a result of battling with moderate to severe depression, she faces risks to herself as well as the baby that are associated with untreated depression during pregnancy."

According to Varma, "if you don't take care of the mom, there may be no baby to speak of."

These findings however are inconclusive according to the authors of the study. "More long-term drug safety studies are needed before evidence-based recommendations can be derived," concluded the authors.

Baby knows best: Baby-led weaning promotes healthy food preferences

A new study by psychologists has shown that babies who are weaned using solid finger food are more likely to develop healthier food preferences and are less likely to become overweight as children than those who are spoon-fed pureed food. (Credit: © Anna Omelchenko / Fotolia)

A new study by psychologists at The University of Nottingham has shown that babies who are weaned using solid finger food are more likely to develop healthier food preferences and are less likely to become overweight as children than those who are spoon-fed pureed food.

The research just published by BMJ Open set out to examine the impact of weaning style on food preferences and Body Mass Index in early childhood in a sample of 155 children.

Co-author of the study, Associate Professor in the School of Psychology, Dr Ellen Townsend, said: "Although numerous studies have focused on when to introduce solid foods into an infant's diet there is a dearth of evidence concerning the impact of different weaning methods on food preferences and health prospects.

We believe our report is the first piece of research to examine whether weaning method can influence food preferences and the future health of the child."

Co-researcher Dr Nicola Pitchford, added: "Our study has produced some very interesting findings. The research suggests that baby-led weaning has a positive impact on the liking of foods that form the building blocks of healthy nutrition, such as carbohydrates.

Baby-led weaning promotes healthy food preferences in early childhood which may protect against obesity."

The researchers enlisted the Nottingham Toddler Lab, based in the School of Psychology, and various relevant websites to recruit parent volunteers for the study.

They all had children between the ages of 20 months and 6½ years and agreed to complete a questionnaire about their experiences of infant feeding and weaning style. 92 parents used baby-led weaning in which the baby is allowed to feed him or herself from a range of solid finger food after the age of 6 months.

63 parents surveyed used traditional spoon-feeding in which they fed their babies smooth purees and increased the texture and range of foods as they grew.

The study also examined the child's preference for 151 different types of food in the common food categories of carbohydrates, proteins and dairy etc. It also took into account the frequency of consumption of each food type and the effect of age on food preference.

Between the two weaning groups, significant differences in preference were found for only one food category -- the baby-led group liked carbohydrates more than the spoon-fed group.

In fact, carbohydrates was the most liked food category for the baby-led group whereas sweet foods was most liked by the spoon-fed group.

The psychologists believe that understanding the factors that contribute to healthy nutrition in early childhood is crucial as this could be the best time to modify food preferences to encourage healthy diets.

The findings show that baby-led weaning has a positive impact on the liking of carbohydrates -- foods that form the building blocks of healthy nutrition. This is a significant result since, up to now, the factors thought to be most influential on early food preferences are sweetness and frequency of exposure.

It was found that children's preference and rate of exposure to foods were not influenced by socially desirable responding, i.e. parents putting down what they think they should report, or socio-economic status, although an increased liking of vegetables was associated with higher social class.

There was an increased incidence of underweight children in the baby-led group and higher obesity rates in the spoon-fed group. But, no difference in picky eating was found between the two weaning groups.

The research project concludes that weaning style does have an impact on food preferences and health in early childhood.

The results suggest that infants weaned through the baby-led method learn to regulate their food intake in a way which leads to a lower BMI and a preference for healthy foods like carbohydrates.

The research team believe their work has important implications for combating the well-documented rise of obesity in contemporary society.

The full report 'Baby knows best? The impact of weaning style on food preferences and Body Mass Index in early childhood in a case-controlled sample' can be found at bmjopen.bmj.com

Babies Process Language like an Adult

Babies, even those too young to talk, can understand many of the words that adults are saying and their brains process them in a grown-up way.

Combining the cutting-edge technologies of MRI and MEG, scientists at the University of California, San Diego show that babies just over a year old process words they hear with the same brain structures as adults, and in the same amount of time.

Moreover, the researchers found that babies were not merely processing the words as sounds, but were capable of grasping their meaning.

This study was jointly led by Eric Halgren, PhD, professor of radiology in the School of Medicine, Jeff Elman, PhD, professor of cognitive science in the Division of Social Sciences, and first author, Katherine E. Travis, of the Department of Neurosciences and the Multimodal Imaging Laboratory, all at UC San Diego. The work is published this week in the Oxford University Press journal Cerebral Cortex.

"Babies are using the same brain mechanisms as adults to access the meaning of words from what is thought to be a mental 'database' of meanings, a database which is continually being updated right into adulthood," said Travis.

Previously, many people thought infants might use an entirely different mechanism for learning words, and that learning began primitively and evolved into the process used by adults.

Determining the areas of the brain responsible for learning language, however, has been hampered by a lack of evidence showing where language is processed in the developing brain.

While lesions in two areas called Broca's and Wernicke's (frontotemporal) areas have long been known to be associated with loss of language skills in adults, such lesions in early childhood have little impact on language development.

To explain this discordance, some have proposed that the right hemisphere and inferior frontal regions are initially critical for language, and that classical language areas of adulthood become dominant only with increasing linguistic experience.

Alternatively, other theories have suggested that the plasticity of an infant's brain allows other regions to take over language-learning tasks if left frontotemporal regions are damaged at an early age.

Baby Hears his Mother's Voice for the First Time

For the first eight months of his life, baby Jonathan had never heard the sound of his mom’s voice, but a cochlear implant changed all that. Jonathan’s dad captured the touching moment on video:

Technology Review: Reading Baby Brains

Technology Review: Reading Baby Brains

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technology used to study brain function and to pinpoint diseased areas of the brain, capitalizes on the very weak magnetic fields created whenever a cluster of neurons fires at once.

A helmet, resembling a salon hair dryer, with 306 sensors hovers over the subject's head and detects where the magnetic pulses are occurring. Unlike magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines--which only show snapshots of data and require people to lie still inside a noisy, narrow tunnel while subjected to a powerful, rotating magnetic field--the MEG is pin-drop quiet and open, allowing subjects to interact with their surroundings. The resulting data can show researchers precisely where activity is occurring in the brain in real time.

A maelstrom of neural connections develop in a child's brain during the first five years of life. Understanding how interconnected circuits develop, and how babies think, could lead to a host of new insights into everything from autism to language acquisition. But gathering such information has been tricky: infants can't be ordered to stay motionless, which is required for most advanced neuroimaging techniques. Now a system that works in concert with existing imaging machinery can account for head movement and, for the first time, let researchers see detailed activity in an active baby's brain.

to study babies that were wide awake and socially engaged, researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Studies (I-LABS) worked with Helsinki-based medical device company Elekta to create a "head-positioning" system remarkably similar to GPS. Scientists strap a soft nylon cap to the baby's head.

The cap has four embedded coils, each of which emits a high-frequency wavelength indicating its relative position at all times. As the hardware system tracks the skull's movement, the software interprets the results and merges them with MEG-sensor data.

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