Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control, joining a debate about the use of a class of antidepressants during pregnancy, confirmed a link between birth defects and some drugs but not others.

Their analysis, published in the BMJ on Wednesday, included 17,952 mothers of children born with birth defects and 9,857 mothers of children without birth defects born between 1997 and 2009 at 10 centers. A total of 1,285 reported taking SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, during one month before conception through the first trimester of pregnancy — the period believed to be the most vulnerable for a fetus.


The drug most commonly used by study participants was Zoloft (sertraline), then Prozac (fluoxetine) and Paxil (paroxetine), Celexa (citalopram), and Lexapro (escitalopram).

Birth defects are alarmingly common, affecting one in every 33 babies born in the United States, but scientists are still in the early stages of determining what causes most of them. Since the Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory warning of a potential association in December 2005 between paroxetine and heart defects in infants, researchers have launched numerous studies to try to confirm the problem but have come to conflicting conclusions.

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