Children exposed to paracetamol during pregnancy have a lower motor development than that of their brother or sister not exposed.
Taking paracetamol during pregnancy would not be so harmless for the development of the child. This treatment would have an impact on motor skills, language and behavior in three-year-old children, according to a Norwegian and Canadian study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
The researchers compared the fate of children exposed to paracetamol compared to a sister or a brother who had not been exposed at all. In this work, they managed to include 3000 pairs of siblings from a large Norwegian cohort that follows 110,000 mothers and their children. Thanks to the data collected, they could compare psychomotor development, learn about genetic and environmental factors, as well as other important factors such as the occurrence of infections, fevers, use of other drugs, alcohol consumption. and tobacco …
According to the results, children who had been exposed during pregnancy to paracetamol for more than 28 days had poorer motor and behavioral development compared to unexposed siblings. The same trend was observed with paracetamol taken for less than 28 days, but with smaller deviations.
In order to determine if an underlying disease, and not paracetamol itself, could be the cause of these negative effects in children, the researchers looked at another type of pain reliever with a different type of mechanism of action, ibuprofen. They did not find similar long-term effects after using this medicine.
“These results reinforce our concern that long-term use of paracetamol during pregnancy may have a negative effect on the development of the child, but that occasional short-term use is probably not harmful to the fetus,” said Pr Hedvig Nordeng of the University of Oslo with caution. Above all, it should be remembered that an epidemiological study, like ours, does not make it possible to prove a cause and effect relationship between maternal consumption of paracetamol during pregnancy and adverse effects in children. As this is the only study to show this, more research is needed to confirm or deny these results, ”stressed the pharmacologist and researcher at the Division of Mental Health, Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
Recall that in 2010, another work published this time in the journal Human Reproduction, had highlighted an association between the intake of light analgesics (aspirin, anti-inflammatory drugs, but also paracetamol) by the pregnant mother and cryptorchidism in boys (testicle remaining in the abdominal position and not descending into the bursae). But for the reference center for teratogens, at the Trousseau hospital in Paris, this study was inconclusive.
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