Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-22-2024

Keywords

antidepressants; breastfeeding; depression; lactation; M/P ratio; nursing infant

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of depression in lactating mothers, there is a lack of knowledge about the excretion of antidepressants into breast milk and its potential adverse effects on infants. This creates concern, making depressed lactating mothers more likely to avoid pharmacological treatment. Clinical lactation studies are the most accurate and direct method to predict and demonstrate the excretion of antidepressants into human breast milk, and results from clinical studies can be included in drug labels to help physicians and patients make decisions on antidepressant use during lactation. However, there are limited clinical trials and studies on the pharmacokinetics of antidepressants in lactating women because of a lack of enrollment and ethical and confounding factors, creating a lack of knowledge in this area. To bridge this gap in knowledge, alternative methods should be sought to help estimate the antidepressant concentration in breast milk, which is used to assess the safety and transfer of antidepressants into breast milk. We provide a comprehensive review of the usage of these cost-effective, time-efficient, and ethically feasible methods that serve to provide a valuable estimation of the safety and transfer of antidepressants into breast milk before conducting clinical studies.

Comments

10.3390/pharmaceutics16070847

Publisher Attribution

Copyright: © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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