CONCLUSIONS
When the ADHD hazard was averaged over the duration of the study’s
follow-up, there was no association between prenatal SSRI/SNRI exposure
and ADHD in offspring, and exposure misclassification could biased our
results towards the null only modestly. The risk for child ADHD
following prenatal SSRI/SNRI exposure was elevated only at age 7-9
years. The lack of a clear duration-related relationship, and the
observed confounding by maternal psychiatric indicators in this study,
does not support a causal link between SSRI/SNRI and child ADHD. Future
research is needed on the age-specific associations between
antidepressants in pregnancy and ADHD subtypes trajectories.
Acknowledgments: The Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study is
supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services and the
Ministry of Education and Research. We are grateful to all the
participating families in Norway who take part in this on-going cohort
study.
Funding : This project is funded through the HN’s ERC Starting
Grant “DrugsInPregnancy” (grant no. 678033). EY is supported by the
Norwegian Research Council (grant no. 262177 and 288083). AL is
supported by the Norwegian Research Council (grant no. 288696). The
funders had no role in the analyses, interpretation of results, or the
writing of this manuscript.
Disclosure of interest: no conflicts to declare.
Contributions of authors: HN and MH conceived the study and
applied for the study data. AL performed the data analysis, and MM
contributed to data curation. AL wrote the initial draft. AL, MM, MH,
HN, EY, and TRK contributed to data interpretation and to writing the
final manuscript. HN obtained funding. The corresponding author attests
that all listed authors meet authorship criteria and that no others
meeting the criteria have been omitted.
Details of Ethics Approval : The establishment of MoBa and
initial data collection was based on a license from the Norwegian Data
protection agency and approval from The Regional Committees for Medical
and Health Research Ethics. The MoBa cohort is based on regulations
based on the Norwegian Health Registry Act. The current study was
approved by The Regional Committees for Medical and Health Research
Ethics on 26th March 2015 (reference number:
2015/442/REK Sør-Øst).
Patient and public
involvement
We did not include patient and public directly throughout the research
process (formulation of research questions, outcome measures
development, study design, recruitment, the conduct of the study, and
dissemination of the results).