Relationship Between Short-Term Antidepressant Use, Stress, High-Fat Diet And Long-Term Weight Gain

Relationship Between Short-Term Antidepressant Use, Stress, High-Fat Diet And Long-Term Weight Gain

Short-space of time use of antidepressants, combined with stress and a high-fat diet, is associated by long-term increases in body efficacy, a new animal study finds. The results were presented Sunday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

"Our study suggests that lacking-term exposure to stress and antidepressants, more readily than a high-calorie, high-obese diet alone, leads to long-mete body weight gain, accompanied with increased bone and dejection weights," said study lead author Suhyun Lee, a PhD solicitant in the medical sciences at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.

Antidepressants are in the midst of the most prevalent medications today, accounting with respect to millions of prescriptions each year. In the United States, physicians wrote more than 1.5 million prescriptions as being antidepressants in 2009, while physicians in Australia wrote again than 12 million of these prescriptions in 2008.

At the same time, obesity rates are climbing in developed countries worldwide. Among adults in the one and the other the United States and Australia, couple-thirds are overweight or obese. Being overweight or fat is a risk factor for crowd serious diseases, including heart disease, which is the leading cause of departure among adults in the United States and Australia.

Unfortunately, measure gain is one of the enormous side effects associated with antidepressants. The sum total of excess weight varies between patients, boundary some have reported increases as ostentatious as 7 percent of the sum total they weighed at the start of their antidepressant manipulation.

In this study, male rats treated by the antidepressant fluoxetine after induced significance had significantly increased body weight compared to sway animals. In addition to greater overall body weight, animals in the antidepressant cluster also developed greater bone and peevishness weights, compared to animals in the check group.

"These findings may implicate diverging pathophysiological mechanisms in stress and antidepressant akin obesity when compared to obesity that is solely diet-induced," Lee related.

During the follow-up, investigators in like manner compared behavior between the drug and ascendency groups. This comparison showed that the antidepressants reduced perplexity among the animals in response to induced inclemency. After the stressful periods, which involved physical restraint, the fluoxetine-treated animals exhibited significantly fewer symptoms of anxiety, compared to the control animals.

The study involved a couple-week period of repeated restraint inclemency, combined with antidepressant treatment among one group of animals, and saline the government among the control group. After the couple-week period, both groups of animals current a high-fat diet for 295 days.