The impact of medicine use in pregnancy is difficult to study. There has been increasing attention to how particular medicines can affect children’s neurodevelopment. The ConcePTION project recently published an inventory of European data sources that can support research on the neurodevelopmental effects of exposure to medicines in pregnancy.
The route to establishing whether a medicine is safe is complex. Determining neurodevelopmental safety is complicated by the wide range of neurodevelopmental outcomes and the length of follow-up that is needed to catch difficulties in relation to skills that develop as the child is growing up. A group of researchers from ConcePTION have developed an inventory of 90 European data sources across 14 countries that can be used to study neurodevelopment.
According to Joanne Given, Faculty of Life and Health Sciences at Ulster University and first author, the inventory covers five domains of neurodevelopment: infant development, child behaviour, cognition, educational achievement, and diagnostic codes for neurodevelopmental disorders.
“The inventory is invaluable to future studies planning to investigate the neurodevelopmental impact of medication exposures during pregnancy”, says Joanne Given.
The inventory that was published in PLoS ONE is a useful resource for evaluating perinatal and long-term childhood risks associated with in-utero exposure to medication.
Read the paper here: Given J, Bromley RL, Coste F, Lopez-Leon S, Loane M (2022) An inventory of European data sources to support pharmacoepidemiologic research on neurodevelopmental outcomes in children following medication exposure in pregnancy: A contribution from the ConcePTION project. PLoS ONE 17(10): e0275979. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275979
By Josepine Fernow