Muristek
Association of Maternal Antidepressant Prescription During Pregnancy and Danish School-aged Children’s Standardized Test Scores
To the Editor I have some comments about the recent study showing, after adjustments, a 2.2-point lower standardized test score for mathematics among children who had been prenatally exposed to maternal antidepressants. Although the magnitude of the adjusted difference in the mathematics test score was small, the mean value being 57, the finding deserves further scrutiny because (1) there is also a difference in language test scores for male students; (2) a dose-response effect seems likely (as shown in Table 3 of the article); (3) the test score difference widened from third- to eighth-grade students despite targeted teaching that should improve the conditions for learning; and (4) prenatal exposure to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) has an association with fetal brain development, particularly in brain regions critical to emotional processing. Therefore, I hope Dr Christensen and colleagues can provide data for the English-language test in the seventh grade and test results in physics/chemistry, biology, and geography in the eighth grade. It would be of interest to perform the analysis specifically for the 2007-2009 period because the prevalence of antidepressant exposure increased from 0.6% during 1997-2000 to 3.4% during 2007-2009.
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