A child may face an increased risk of asthma if the child's mother experienced depression during her pregnancy or she took an older antidepressant to treat her condition, new research suggests.
However, more than 80 percent of the women in the study who were prescribed antidepressants were given one of a newer class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). And those medications were not linked to any increased risk for asthma in the child.
"How maternal depression affects asthma risk in the offspring is unknown, but the mechanism could involve hormone changes or changes in lifestyles," said study lead author Dr. Xiaoqin Liu, an epidemiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. "The most significant finding in our study is that we found that [overall] antidepressant use during pregnancy did not increase the risk of asthma in general."
[For more of this story, written by Tara Haelle, go to http://consumer.healthday.com/...hma-risk-697196.html]
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