SSRIs, Lack Of Oxygen In Utero Linked To Autism?

I'm definitely putting that out there with a big question mark, but a neurologist who's blog I like is openly speculating on that front. He's Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at University of California at San Francisco and Chief Scientific Officer at Posit Science. He's previously tackled the doping up of kiddos caught in the bipolar child paradigm.

And here he is on autism. He only briefly hints that he's going to have much more to say about SSRIs and autism down the road:

"The discussion of SSRIs is complicated, and because we (led by a collaborating scientist from the University of Mississippi, Dr. Rick Lin) are preparing a research report on this subject, I am going to hold it back when I can discuss it in more detail in a later blog. One important consideration: These drugs are used to help mothers in very important ways that contribute POSITIVELY to stable pregnancies and to successful infant nursing and rearing. Any potentially negative impacts that they may have on their infants must be weighed against these important counter-balancing positive factors.

"Which brings us to perinatal anoxia. We have published compelling evidence that peri-natal anoxia meets all of the other criteria for adding to “noisy” brain processing. It can have strong, selective impacts on cortical inhibitory processes, and degrades the ability of the cortex to develop normally-selective characteristics of response (see Strata, Merzenich et al, PNAS, 2005). At the same time, we had dismissed perinatal anoxia as a likely factor contributing to autism’s apparent rise because we could not see how ITS incidence could be growing over the past several decades.

"However, it has recently been argued that the especially high susceptibility of the highly metabolically active auditory brainstem to brief periods of anoxia that we and others have documented comes into play in the few to many tens of seconds of oxygen starvation that can stem from very rapid umbilical cord clamping— practices for which have changed (more rapid clamping has been adopted) over the past several decades."

I don't know how much credence to place on his thoughts and I sure don't know enough about labor and delivery practices to get into cord clamping, but these are certainly both interesting and perhaps plausible explanations for what's been going on with all these kids. And worth putting out there so you all know more.

Thanks to the reader who brought this to my attention.