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Published in The Lancet, the large-scale study found that some antidepressants can cause clinically relevant changes in body weight, heart rate, and blood pressure within just a few weeks, while others appear largely neutral in their physical effects. Researchers are calling for antidepressant treatment guidelines to be updated to reflect these findings.
Up to 20 per cent of adults in Europe and North America are prescribed antidepressants to treat a range of conditions. While these medications are known to cause physical side effects, the degree to which these alterations occur in patients treated with different antidepressants was previously unclear.
Researchers in this study analysed the data from 151 different studies, comparing the physical health effects of 30 different antidepressants across more than 58,000 people.
They found notable variation between drugs, even over relatively short treatment periods — most studies involved around eight weeks of antidepressant use. For example, there was up to a four kilogram difference in average weight change between some drugs, equivalent to around 2.5 kg of weight loss with agomelatine compared with about 2 kg of weight gain with maprotiline.
The study also estimated that weight gain occurred in nearly half of people prescribed drugs such as maprotiline or amitriptyline, whereas over half of those taking agomelatine experienced weight loss. Similarly, there was a 21-beat-per-minute difference in heart rate between fluvoxamine and nortriptyline.
Read the full story on the Department of Psychiatry website.