posted on 2024-02-29, 18:33authored byLaura Staal, Torsten Plösch, Theodora Kunovac Kallak, Inger Sundström Poromaa, Bregje Wertheim, Jocelien D. A. Olivier
About 5% of pregnant women are treated with selective
serotonin
reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants to treat their depression.
SSRIs influence serotonin levels, a key factor in neural embryonic
development, and their use during pregnancy has been associated with
adverse effects on the developing embryo. However, the role of the
placenta in transmitting these negative effects is not well understood.
In this study, we aim to elucidate how disturbances in the maternal
serotonergic system affect the villous tissue of the placenta by assessing
whole transcriptomes in the placentas of women with healthy pregnancies
and women with depression and treated with the SSRI fluoxetine during
pregnancy. Twelve placentas of the Biology, Affect, Stress, Imaging
and Cognition in Pregnancy and the Puerperium (BASIC) project were
selected for RNA sequencing to examine differentially expressed genes:
six male infants and six female infants, equally distributed over
women treated with SSRI and without SSRI treatment. Our results show
that more genes in the placenta of male infants show changed expression
associated with fluoxetine treatment than in placentas of female infants,
stressing the importance of sex-specific analyses. In addition, we
identified genes related to extracellular matrix organization to be
significantly enriched in placentas of male infants born to women
treated with fluoxetine. It remains to be established whether the
differentially expressed genes that we found to be associated with
SSRI treatment are the result of the SSRI treatment itself, the underlying
depression, or a combination of the two.