Anti-Depressant Drug Believed to Improve Down Syndrome Set for Testing in the Womb

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Parents of children with Down syndrome have discovered a potential treatment for the said condition in the form of the antidepressant drug fluoxetine, sold as Prozac.

There is no cure for Down syndrome and no drug treatment either, which is frustrating to parents. However, Prozac showed a promising potential to treat the said condition, MIT Technology Review reported

Paul Watson, a Southwest Airlines pilot, always takes the time to visit the labs of local scientists studying Down syndrome when he lands to a new city. He wants to be updated with it because his 14-year-old son, Nathan, has the condition.

Watson's learned one idea spreading among parents and that is the use of Prozac. He took the time to read about studies on mice that yields positive results with the use of the blockbuster antidepressant. He got a prescription for his son, who has been taking the drug for three years already.

"Nathan is doing pretty well cognitively," Watson said. "Other parents whose kids are taking Prozac also feel that their kids are performing ahead of their peers with Down syndrome," he added.

At the time, there has no clinical trial of Prozac's effectiveness in Down syndrome. Only few pharmaceutical companies study any treatment for the said disorder but this might change with Watson's advocacy. "We want a drug trial. We wanted to legitimize it with a formal study," he said.

According to UPI, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center will start enrolling pregnant women whose fetuses have been diagnosed with Down syndrome in a trial to test if the drug can prevent babies from being born with symptoms of the condition or alleviate its effects by improving the brain development.

"Since brain alterations in Down syndrome start to be present prenatally, the prenatal period represents an optimum window of opportunity for therapeutic interventions," said the researchers from Italy and France in a study on the importance of the drug treatment timing for the condition. "Importantly, recent studies clearly show that treatment during the prenatal period can rescue overall brain development and behavior and that this effect outlasts treatment cessation."

However, some are concerned with the potential side effects of taking Prozac during pregnancy. A 2015 study learned that it could increase the risk for birth defects like heart wall defects and irregular skull shape. However, Down syndrome researchers explained that the risk for these side effects is small.

Matt Byerly, a psychiatry professor who helped design the trial, agreed that testing the drug while still in the womb is important. "What I found is that there are significant effects evident in the brain by the end of the second trimester and certainly by birth," he said. "I felt that to take advantage of what fluoxetine could potentially do, we needed to intervene before these changes occur."