SSRI Long Term Outcomes

Hey everyone. So there was actually a recent study that looked at the harm of taking SSRI's long term. And historically this has not been very well known whether or not long-term use of antidepressants like SSRI's, Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro cause issues long term.
So this data is actually really well needed and insightful.
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This was published last month, September 2022, and it was looking at 10 years of data from the UK over 220,000 individuals who had been on antidepressants for more than 10 years. And So what they found was that it was associated with a twofold higher risk of cardiovascular disease and that they’re risk of all-cause mortality was double meaning the rate at which they died for any reason. So that's called all-cause mortality.
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On the other hand, at 10 years, antidepressant risk was associated with a 23% lower risk of hypertension and a 32% lower risk of diabetes. The authors state that regardless of whether or not the drugs are the underlying cause of the problems, the findings emphasize the importance of proactive cardiovascular monitoring and prevention in patients who have depression and are on antidepressants.
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The caveat to this is that it was retrospective study. It wasn't a randomized controlled trial where you looked at individuals with depression who took SSRI's, individuals with depression who didn't take SSRI’s. So that would be much more Insightful to say whether or not antidepressants actually caused those issues.
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To conclude that antidepressants increased cardiovascular risk. The proper control population needs to be the people who had depression but didn't take antidepressants.
Otherwise, we don't know if the observed risk is due to treatment or due to the underlying condition. A cohort of major depressive persons who have matched severity
of depression with those who didn't take the treatment should be studied. It really should be studied.
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Treatment versus non treatment results would provide very much important information.
#longterm #cardiovasculardisease #risk #diabetes #therapy #negativethoughts #thoughts #mentalhealth