During pregnancy you have to take care of your diet, do the recommended physical exercise and sleep well, and it is especially important not to expose yourself to toxins such as alcohol or tobacco, but you also have to avoid taking medications as much as possible, and only when have been prescribed by a doctor. In fact, pregnant women should not take certain drugs, although others can be consumed in moderation if necessary.
Paracetamol or acetaminophen is, precisely, one of the medications that pregnant women can take and is therefore one of the most used by pregnant women around the world. However, several studies have found a link between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and neurobehavioral problems in children, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
A new study conducted by a group of researchers led by Kristin K. Sznajder, from the Department of Public Health Sciences, Penn State University School of Medicine (USA) has analyzed the association between the consumption of paracetamol during Pregnancy and neurobehavioral problems in children at the age of three.
Sleep and attention problems in children exposed to paracetamol
The researchers evaluated data from 2,423 mother-child pairs and completed a prenatal stress questionnaire. They followed up the participants that allowed them to screen the children at age three for behavioral problems, and compared the children of mothers who did not take acetaminophen with those of those who did. 41.7% of the women who participated in the study (1,011) stated that they had taken paracetamol during pregnancy.
Children who had been exposed to acetaminophen during pregnancy had significantly higher scores on withdrawal, sleep problems, and attention problems.
The results of the study showed that children who had been exposed to acetaminophen during pregnancy had significantly higher scores on three of the seven scales on the CBCL (a standard tool for assessing behavior problems in children): withdrawal, problems with sleep and attention problems.
The authors of the work associated these scores with prenatal stress, and adjusted the data so that no factor could influence the results, after which they verified that two of the syndromes continued to be significantly higher in children who had been exposed to paracetamol in the maternal womb; specifically, they had trouble sleeping and attention problems.
The findings have been published in PLOS One, where the researchers state that “these findings corroborate previous studies that established associations between prenatal exposure to acetaminophen and attention problems in offspring and also show an association with sleep problems at three years . Because the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy is common, these results are of public health concern and suggest caution in the use of acetaminophen-containing medications during pregnancy.”
Eduard Gratacós, director of the BCNatal maternal-fetal medicine center (Hospital Clínic-Sant Joan de Déu) and professor at the University of Barcelona, as he told SMC Spain, believes that the work “is of quality, but like most of these studies is limited, as it is based on a database that, although it is of quality, was not designed to accurately assess the objective of the study. For this reason, the conclusions, although valid and relevant, must be contextualized, especially in the sense that it is not possible to rule out confounding factors that could explain the observed association. A very clear example is that when the authors adjust for maternal stress, some associations are lost, and this shows how complex it is to evaluate associations between consumption during pregnancy and a subsequent outcome, something that can only be established with some certainty in studies that are clinical trials randomized and specifically designed to answer the research question.
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