Common Medications Taken During Pregnancy Are Not Associated With Risk for Autism
New method developed by Mount Sinai team allows systematic study of effects of a wide range of drugs on the developing fetus
Babies exposed in the womb to the majority of medications that target neurotransmitter systems, including typical targets of antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, are not any more likely to develop autism than non-exposed babies, according to research conducted at The Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published in JAMA Psychiatry.
However, the rates of autism were higher among children of mothers with worse general health before pregnancy, suggesting that the mother’s health plays a more critical role in a child’s development than the medications she takes.
While previous research has suggested that children of women who use certain drugs during pregnancy are more likely to be diagnosed with autism those studies only looked at the autism risk in relation to a very small number of drugs. Additionally, the designs of previous studies inherently involved a tight link between offspring exposure and maternal disorder and, therefore, could not fully distinguish between the results of the drug itself and those related to the maternal disorder for which the drug was prescribed.
To overcome such limitations, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai developed a new method that enabled them to systematically evaluate the effects of a wide range of drugs on the fetus in a sample of nearly 100,000 children born between 1997 and 2007 and followed up for autism until January 2016.
“When we assessed the effects of prenatal exposure to medications that affect major neurotransmitter systems, we found that the most of the associations are substantially modified when accounting for maternal characteristics,” said Magdalena Janecka, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at The Seaver Center and first author of the paper. “What this suggests is that higher estimates of autism risk among offspring of mothers who take certain medications during pregnancy are most likely not due to pharmacological effects of those drugs.”
Specifically, the study team performed a case-cohort study using data from a large health maintenance organization in Israel. Researchers grouped medications prescribed to pregnant women based on the biological target on which those drugs act, rather than the condition the drug was prescribed to treat. The rationale behind this approach was that if certain types of pharmaceuticals affect the risk of the disorder by interfering with some facet of neurodevelopment, they will exert their effects regardless of maternal indication or of the internal system upon which they were designed to act. This new method allowed the study team to systematically evaluate the actions of more than 180 drugs, sorting them into 55 groups within which the medications were similar in terms of their function but were prescribed for different conditions.
The exposure interval in this study was defined as the pregnancy period (280 days before the child’s birth), and women in the study were considered exposed to a given medication regardless of the number of prescriptions or their redemption rate. Children were classified as exposed to a given group if their mother received a prescription for any medication from that group during pregnancy. Drugs could be classified into multiple groups, reflecting their diverse actions on maternal and fetal systems. Maternal number of diagnoses was defined as the total number of medical/reported health issues between one year prior to pregnancy and the child’s birth.
“After adjusting for the child’s year of birth, and a number of maternal factors—including her age at the child’s birth, history of psychiatric and neurological disorders, and number of medical diagnoses around pregnancy—our data indicate that the majority of medications known to affect neurotransmitters, and taken by women during pregnancy, may not themselves influence the estimates of offspring autism risk,” says Dr. Janecka. “In actuality, maternal number of diagnoses can confound associations between prenatal exposures and autism, and therefore should be accounted for in future studies.”
The biology-first method used in this study, in which the shared biological properties of medications are explicitly acknowledged in the analytical procedures, aims to understand the causal mechanisms that underlie the effects of prenatal exposure to medications and, therefore, could be pertinent to studies of other conditions that originate in utero. Researchers at The Seaver Center are currently investigating further how maternal health could affect a child’s risk of autism.
This study was funded in part by the Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation.
About the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at Mount Sinai
The Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at Mount Sinai conducts progressive research studies aimed at understanding the multiple causes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The multidisciplinary team is composed of experts in the fields of genetics, molecular biology, model systems, neuroimaging, biomarkers, diagnosis, and experimental therapeutics who are dedicated to discovering the biological causes of ASD. The Center strives to develop innovative diagnostics and treatments for integration into the provision of personalized, comprehensive assessment and care for people with ASD. The Seaver Autism Center was founded through the generous support of the Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation. For more information, visit www.seaverautismcenter.org.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with 48,000 employees working across eight hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, more than 600 research and clinical labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time—discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it.
Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 9,000 primary and specialty care physicians and 11 free-standing joint-venture centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida. Hospitals within the System are consistently ranked by Newsweek’s® “The World’s Best Smart Hospitals, Best in State Hospitals, World Best Hospitals and Best Specialty Hospitals” and by U.S. News & World Report's® “Best Hospitals” and “Best Children’s Hospitals.” The Mount Sinai Hospital is on the U.S. News & World Report® “Best Hospitals” Honor Roll for 2024-2025.
For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
New Study Suggests Ketamine May Be An Effective Treatment for Children with ADNP Syndrome
Sep 06, 2022 View All Press Releases
Scientists May Need to Rethink How Genomics Impacts Risk for OCD
Nov 18, 2021 View All Press Releases