AntiDepressants Expert

Antidepressants can help depressed patients with physical illness, and doctors should consider them more often, researchers said on Wednesday. While around 10 percent of patients with physical diseases are thought to suffer from depression, studies suggest doctors are less likely to prescribe antidepressants because they are not sure if the medicines will work well.

A systematic review by British scientists found the drugs were more effective than placebos, or dummy pills, at treating depression in patients with physical illnesses including stroke, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s disease and various types of cancer.
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Antidepressant (AD) treatment in coronary artery disease (CAD) patients suffering from depression results in significant therapeutic effects without substantially increased rates of discontinuation, a new study has concluded.

According to the Canadian researchers, depression can occur in up to 45 per cent of patients with CAD, where it is associated with an increased risk of acute coronary events and mortality. The team from Toronto performed a meta-analysis of randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind trials with a database search of the English literature (to March 2008) and manual search of references. Read the rest of this entry »

The study, based on a database of more than 200,000 Quebec residents aged 65 and older, showed statistical relationships between a diagnosis of cataracts or cataract surgery and the class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as between cataracts and specific drugs within that class.

The researchers say that the study does not prove causation but only reveals an association between the use of SSRIs and the development of cataracts. Read the rest of this entry »

Women who take strategic serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants during pregnancy are twice as likely to give birth prematurely as women who do not take the drugs, according to a study published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine and funded by the Danish Medical Research Council. Read the rest of this entry »

Antidepressant treatments usually seem to need three to four weeks to become effective. Therefore, the finding of treatments with a swifter onset could be a chief objective of biological psychiatry. The first drug discovered to generate quick in mood appears to be the NMDA glutamate receptor antagonist, ketamine.

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health account that another medication, scopolamine, also seems to generate replicable fast enhancement in mood. Scopolamine may momentarily obstruct the muscarinic cholinergic receptor, believed to be overactive in people with depression. Read the rest of this entry »