Use of Antidepressants and Rates of Hip Bone Loss in Older Women
There has been much controversy lately when it comes to antidepressants. It turns out that many of the clinical trials done on antidepressants were never published because they did not find a positive effect. What a way to paint your product in a better light–keep running clinical trials until you get one that comes out the way you want it to.
The bottom line is that this class of drugs is really effective in only a small percentage of patients. To make this worse, despite widespread availability of neurotransmitter testing to get a much better idea of what’s going on to cause someone to feel depressed, this form of testing is almost never used. So, now we have a clinical trial that finds the use of SSRIs almost DOUBLES the rate of bone loss, leading to a greater risk of developing osteoporosis, which is rapidly increasing in incidence.