Prenatal exposure to antiepileptic drugs and early processing of emotionally relevant sounds

Abstract

Introduction. Prenatal exposure to antiepileptic drugs (AED) is associated with developmental compromises in verbal intelligence and social skills in childhood. Our aim was to evaluate whether a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN) paradigm assessing semantic and emotional components of linguistic and emotional processing would be useful to detect possible alterations in early auditory processing of newborns with prenatal AED exposure. Material and methods. Data on AED exposure, pregnancy outcome, neuropsychological evaluation of the mothers, information on maternal epilepsy type, and a structured neurological examination of the newborn were collected prospectively. We compared a cohort of 36 AED exposed and 46 control newborns at the age of two weeks by measuring MMN with a multi-feature paradigm with six linguistically relevant deviant sounds and three emotionally uttered sounds. Results. Frontal responses for the emotionally uttered stimuli Happy differed significantly in the exposed newborns compared to the control newborns. In addition, responses to sounds with or without emotional component differed in newborns exposed to multiple AEDs compared to control newborns or to newborns exposed to only one AED. Discussion. Our study implies that prenatal antiepileptic drug exposure may alter early processing of emotionally and linguistically relevant sound information.