SSRI's

There’s an interesting exposé in the London Daily Mail, September 29, titled Critics claim antidepressants are being handed out like sweets… Thanks to Leonie and Antidepaware on Twitter for the link. To find out how easily people could get prescriptions for antidepressants, the Mail sent "…three women of differing ages — all of whom had no current mental health issues — to their doctors, reporting fictional symptoms of mild depression which had lasted for three to six weeks." ...

Earlier this month, the American Journal of Psychiatry published an article by Yen-Po Wang, M.D., et al, titled Short-Term Use of Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Risk of Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding. [Thanks to Mad in America for the link] The research was conducted in Taiwan. The authors studied the records of 5,377 psychiatric inpatients with gastrointestinal bleeding between 1998 and 2009. Study subjects served as their own controls, i.e. the incidence of bleeding in the period following the antidepressant prescription was compared with the incidence of bleeding during a period when they were not taking antidepressants. ...

There’s an interesting article on Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. It’s called Learning from Negative Feedback in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder is Attenuated by SSRI Antidepressants. The researchers evaluated learning ability in three groups: medication-naïve individuals who met the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder individuals who met the criteria for MDD and were receiving the SSRI paroxetine (Paxil) "healthy" controls All subjects were given a learning task that allowed the researchers to distinguish learning from positive feedback versus learning from negative feedback The results were: ...

A mass murder occurred yesterday, September 16, at the U.S. Navy Yard in Washington D.C. There are reports of at least 12 dead, and several wounded. Early news stories describe the perpetrator as having “mental issues,” and it is reported that he “…had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems.” It is likely that this “treatment” involved the prescription of psychiatric drugs. And still no government inquiry into the link between psycho-pharmaceutical products, especially SSRI’s, and acts of violence/suicide. ...

Courtesy of Nanu Grewal in Australia, I’ve come across this interesting paper: Systematic meta-analysis of individual selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor medications and congenital malformations, by Nicholas Myles et al. The authors note that there is some suggestion of a link between SSRI’s, as a group, and birth defects, but that the teratogenicity of individual members of this drug class have not been systematically compared by meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is essentially a systematic review of previous studies and combining of the results of those that meet certain pre-determined criteria for research quality. ...

There’s an interesting article on this topic by Hans Jensen et al, in the February 21, 2013 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry. You can see an abstract here. The authors conducted a register study on all pregnant women in Denmark from 1996 to 2006, linking data from the Medical Birth Register, the Psychiatric Central Register, and the National Prescription Database. They found that the "… use of SSRIs during pregnancy increases the risk of a low Apgar score independently of maternal depression." ...