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Antipsychotics During Pregnancy Do Not Hinder Children’s Test Performance
Maternal antipsychotic prescriptions during pregnancy did not appear to be associated with standardized test scores when offspring were in primary or lower secondary school, according to study results published online ahead of print in JAMA Internal Medicine.
“An increasing number of individuals fill antipsychotic prescriptions during pregnancy, and concerns have been raised about prenatal antipsychotic exposure on neurodevelopmental outcomes,” wrote a research team from Aarhus University in Denmark.
The register-based cohort study included 667,517 children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2009 who were attending public primary and lower secondary school. As part of a national testing program, all of the children underwent at least one language or mathematics test. The average age at the time of testing ranged from 8.9 years in grade 2 to 14.9 years in grade 8.
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Some 1442 of the children, or 0.2% of the study population, had mothers who filled an antipsychotic prescription during their pregnancy. When researchers compared standardized test scores for children exposed to antipsychotics before birth and children with no exposure, they found no significant differences.
Out of a possible 100 points, crude mean language test scores were 50.0 for children exposed to antipsychotics and 55.4 for unexposed children. The adjusted difference between the groups was 0.5, according to the study. For mathematics, crude mean test scores were 48.1 for the exposed children and 56.1 for the unexposed children. The adjusted difference between groups was 0.4.
The findings remained robust across various sensitivity analyses, including sibling-controlled and probabilistic bias analyses, researchers advised.
“The findings provide further reassuring data on offspring neurodevelopmental outcomes associated with antipsychotic treatment during pregnancy,” the authors concluded.
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