14 DAY TRIAL // A new research has demonstrated that people who use antidepressants from older generations are at an increased risk of developing cardiovascular diseases (CVD). The finding was derived from a study surveying thousands of people.
The research was conducted on more than 15,000 Scottish residents, who were followed for many years. The findings apply only to tricyclic antidepressants, who were commonly used in older drugs.
The risk people exposed themselves to unwittingly exceeded 35 percent, scientists say, which is a lot. This means that one in three people taking them is at risk of developing CVD.
In the same study, researchers couldn't find any association between increased CVD risk and modern drugs containing selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRI).
The investigation was carried out by researchers at the University College London in the United Kingdom. Full details of the work appear in latest online issue of the esteemed European Heart Journal.
Scientists in charge of the research say that this is the first-ever study of this sort to be conducted on a large, representative sample of the general population, including 14,784 men and women.
At the beginning of the experiments, none of the participants had a known history of CVD. The effects that antidepressants may have on the heart were never investigated in this manner before, PyschCentral reports.
“Our study is the first to contain a representative sample of the whole community, including elderly and unemployed participants, men and women, etc.,” explains UCL researcher Dr. Mark Hamer.
“Therefore, our results can be generalized better to the wider community. The majority of previous work in this area has focused on clinical cardiac patients, so studies in healthy participants are very important,” he adds.
“Given that antidepressants, such as SSRIs, are now prescribed not only for depression, but for a wide range of conditions such as back pain, headache, anxiety and sleeping problems, the risks associated with antidepressants have increasing relevance to the general population,” the expert says.
Hamer holds an appointment as a senior research fellow in the UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. His team used data from the Scottish Health Survey to tease out the connections.
Data from additional surveys conducted in 1995, 1998 and 2003 on people above the age of 35 were also integrated in the overall conclusions. Hamer adds.
“Our findings suggest that there is an association between the use of tricyclic antidepressants and an increased risk of CVD that is not explained by existing mental illness,” the UCL researcher says.
“This suggests that there may be some characteristic of tricyclics that is raising the risk. Tricyclics are known to have a number of side effects; they are linked to increased blood pressure, weight gain and diabetes and these are all risk factors for CVD,” he concludes.