Pregnant women with untreated major depression, as well as those taking certain antidepressants, had rates of premature birth greater than 20%, according to a new study published in the March 2009 issue of American Journal of Psychiatry.
The researchers followed 238 women with no, partial and continuous exposure to either depression or an SSRI antidepressant and then compared the outcomes. They found that women who were
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Is one antidepressant medication better than another? Multiple studies have addressed this question, but getting an accurate answer is difficult. Human beings aren’t exactly alike. How one medication affects one person may not affect another the same way. Therefore, concluding that one group of people studied benefited from a medication doesn’t mean that all people that take the drug will benefit. So, what’s the take-away message? Consider
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The US scientists say that antidepressants that are taken by millions of men to alleviate depression may harm their sperm.
The researchers gave the antidepressant paroxetine to a small number of healthy men for four weeks and found that these men had far higher levels of sperm with damaged DNA.
The outcomes of the study have been reported in New Scientist magazine and they d
o not necessarily indicate that
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Women who took the antidepressants Prozac (fluoxetine) or Paxil (paroxetine) in their first trimester were significantly more likely to give birth to babies with heart problems than women who did not take them, according to a new study published in the November issue of the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.
The babies born to mothers who took Prozac had over four times greater risk, while the babies of mothers
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Richard Friedman, MD, recently wrote an article in the New York Times about our troubled relationship with antidepressants. He opens his article by asking how antidepressants might affect a patient’s psychological development and core identity.
It’s an interesting question, one which some have discussed in the past, but which is worth another attempt. Unfortunately, Friedman doesn’t actually explore this question. What he does
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