Study: Antidepressants Boost Fracture Risk

Older Adults Who Take Antidepressants Are Prone To Falls And Have Double The Risk Of Bone Fractures

(AP)  Dr. Robert Josse, director of the Osteoporosis Centre at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, said the SSRI study provides "an important observation which is actually consistent with all the other data that exists."

Even without SSRI use, an estimated one in four women and one in eight men over age 50 will develop osteoporosis; the risk of an associated fracture is 40 percent for women and 15 percent for men, said Josse, who was one of the investigators for the overall CAMOS study but had no involvement in the SSRI portion of the research.

"One has to be doubly vigilant in those people who anyway merit evaluation for osteoporosis," he said. "And amongst the questions we're particularly interested in and we should add to our risk factor profile is the use of SSRIs."

Dr. David Healy, an expert in psychopharmacology at the University of Wales College of Medicine, said researchers are finding more and more side-effects associated with SSRIs, which he believes are vastly over-prescribed.

Previous research has shown that the drugs may increase the risk of bleeding in the gut and brain (a cause of stroke), have been linked to possible birth defects when women take the medication during pregnancy and may induce suicidal thoughts in some people, he said.

Furthermore, pre-marketing clinical trials of the medications show that the proportion of subjects who responded to pills containing active drug (50 percent) was only slightly higher than the proportion who reported feeling better after taking dummy pills (40 percent), said Healy. That suggests that for many patients, depression can resolve on its own over time or through discussion with a doctor or therapist, he added.

"But given that actually so few people comparatively are specifically helped by the drug, then it seems to me that people need to be informed about all of the risks so that they can work out whether this is a risk that they're happy to take," said Healy, who does prescribe the drugs to patients under certain circumstances.

In a statement responding to the study, the maker of Zoloft called depression "a serious problem in the elderly that is under-diagnosed and under-treated."

"SSRIs are an important option for the treatment of depression in this population," Pfizer Inc. said. "As the authors note, the risks must be balanced against the benefits gained by the treatment of depression."

[olgreyghost]

Does this mean Tom was right? Hmmm...

[petesis]

Antidepressants are snake oil and the more that comes out about them, the more they look like a little snake venom mixed in. I have seen more people hurt by them than helped.