Articles related to ANTIDEPRESSANTS

“Because medicine abhors a therapeutic vacuum,” the hallucinogens psilocybin and LSD are being revisited as potential candidates for treating depression. But effect size seems less than that of currently approved antidepressants.

Pregnant women who filled prescriptions for bupropion, citalopram, escitalopram, fluoxetine, or sertraline during pregnancy (antidepressant-exposed cohort) and pregnant women who did not fill an antidepressant prescription within 90 days of the start of their pregnancy through delivery (control group) were the subjects of the study conducted by researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the United States. The main finding concerned the frequency of ADHD, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), behavioral disorder, developmental coordination disorder, developmental speech or language disorder, intellectual disability, any NDDs, and specific learning disorders among the children of the women in the study.

This broad review of recent studies in women’s health topics aims to help the primary care physician in discussing and guiding therapy for women in topics from cardiovascular disease to pelvic pain. The review covers such questions as: How does migraine with aura affect CVD risk in women? How do you respond to patient questions about fracture risk and bisphosphonates? Are antidepressants safe for women who are considering pregnancy? Is gabapentin effective for chronic pelvic pain?

Some studies in children have reported a relationship between antidepressant use in pregnancy and neurodevelopment disorders after birth. In this analysis of 145,702 antidepressant-exposed and 3,032,745 unexposed pregnancies, crude results suggested up to a doubling in risk of neurodevelopmental outcomes. Significantly, however, no association was observed after balancing for confounding variables.

Data on more than 200,000 individuals revealed that non-SSRI antidepressants were associated with a two-fold increased risk of coronary heart disease, cardiovascular mortality, and all-cause mortality at ten years. There was also evidence that SSRIs were associated with lower rates of hypertension and diabetes.

Patients discontinuing antidepressant therapy experience insomnia, flu-like symptoms, mood disturbances, dizziness, and paresthesias — among a broad array of adverse effects. Those symptoms can last for days to months. This narrative review describes the array of discontinuation symptoms and their causes and provides practical clinical guidance for discontinuing antidepressants to minimize the risk of antidepressant discontinuation syndrome (ADS).