Researchers tracked more than 1,000 Australian infants and found children whose mothers used antidepressants in the last three months of pregnancy had up to nine times higher odds of developing autism.
At 6 years old, he stared through you while you were talking, or fixed his eyes on some distant point above and beyond as if he were watching a plane passing by.
At 8 years old, he often flapped his hands or rocked back and forth for no apparent reason, ignoring attempts to intervene.
This is autism—a condition affecting brain development that can influence communication, social interaction and behavior.
It can also break a parent’s heart.
The message is clear: If you want a healthy baby, don’t take antidepressants during pregnancy.
And now, an Australian study reveals that a mother’s choices during pregnancy can dramatically increase the odds that her child will become autistic. Mothers who used SSRI or SNRI antidepressants during the last three months of pregnancy gave birth to children with nine times higher odds of autism compared to those who did not use the drugs.
So, if that’s what happens if you consume these drugs in the last three months of pregnancy, is it safe to take them during the first six months?
Only if you consider a 6.43 times higher risk of autism for your baby “acceptable.”
Researchers arrived at their conclusions after analyzing data from the Barwon Infant Study, an ongoing long-term research project that follows more than 1,000 children born in the Barwon region of the Australian state of Victoria between 2010 and 2013, tracking their health outcomes over time.
The data leaves little room for doubt. Higher antidepressant use during pregnancy is consistently linked to dramatically higher rates of autism.
And the message is clear: If you want a healthy baby, don’t take antidepressants during pregnancy.
The researchers, however, are cautious. They identify a series of other potential factors that could also influence their findings—including nutrition, air pollution and vinyl flooring.
But the numbers tell a different story.
A US Department of Health and Human Services press release last spring declares, “Autism Epidemic Runs Rampant.”
The article continues: “One in 31 American children born in 2014 [is] disabled by autism. That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992. Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20, and in California, it’s 1 in 12.5.”
The obvious conclusion is that if autism has nearly quintupled since, then whatever was an active factor in creating autism must also have nearly quintupled over the same period.
Did the vinyl flooring industry boom nearly five times over since that year?
No, but something else did.
That “something else” entered the psychiatric armory in the late 1980s and exploded in popularity almost overnight: “modern” SSRI antidepressants.
