Postdoctoral Researcher
University of California San Diego, United States and Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
My name is Essi Whaites Heinonen, MD, PhD. I am a neonatologist at Karolinska University Hospital and and a researcher at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Currently, I am visiting University of California San Diego for a postdoctoral scholarship funded by the Swedish Research Council. My research primarily focuses on understanding the effects of chronic drug treatment during pregnancy and breastfeeding on the mother, the infant and the milk composition. I am also one of the authors for the Swedish information base for drug treatment during pregnancy, Janusmed Fosterpåverkan.
I defended my thesis on psychotropic drug treatment during pregnancy and lactation in 2022. In my thesis, I studied 1) the use of sertraline during pregnancy and sertraline plasma concentrations in pregnant women and their infants in a prospective clinical cohort, 2) the use of antipsychotic drugs during pregnancy and the risk for gestational diabetes for the mother and neonatal complications for the infant in the Swedish National Health Registers, and 3) the use of lithium during breastfeeding and the serum concentrations and clinical effects in the breastfed infants in a retrospective clinical cohort.
My postdoctoral studies at University of California San Diego, on the prospectively collected MotherToBaby cohort and the Mommy's Milk Human Milk Biorepository, focus on the effects of chronic drug treatment during breastfeeding. In the first study, I compared breastfeeding rates between women with and without chronic medications. I will also study the effects of chronic drug treatment on the composition of human milk, with focus on macronutrients and human milk oligosaccharides, as well as the long-term neurodevelopmental effects after intrauterine exposure to antidepressants, and whether being breastfed made a difference for the development.