Study: Long-Term Anti-Depressant Use Raises Diabetes Risk

As if my other post today on anti-depressants (and untreated depression) being linked to premature births doesn't raise enough concerns, another new study out in the American Journal of Psychiatry reports that long-term anti-depressant use raises the risk of diabetes by 84 percent across all classes of anti-depressants, especially when used in moderate to high doses. The reason seems to be due to weight gain, but researchers were unable to pin down a full explanation. The diabetes risk is not present in short-term use of anti-depressants, researchers report.

Tricyclics increased the risk 77 percent while SSRIs increased it by 106 percent. You can read the complete study yourself to see how individual anti-depressants fared (keep in mind that for some of the drugs the effected group was so small as to make some of the findings a bit tenuous).

If you wonder that perhaps there's something about the underlying depression that's causing weight gain and diabetes risk, read how the researchers handled that question:

"Could our results be explained by the fact that depression itself and not the antidepressant drug treatment increases the risk of diabetes? It has been reported that patients with depression have a 35% increase in risk of developing diabetes as compared with nondepressed individuals. The underlying reasons for this association are unknown. One might argue that patients treated with antidepressants for >24 months are a special subgroup with an increased risk of diabetes only because of their active depressive disorder. There are several reasons why this explanation is rather unlikely. First, one would expect to see increased risks with most individual antidepressants used for >24 months if the increased diabetes were caused by the depression and not by the drug. In contrast, our results indicate that antidepressants differ with respect to their diabetogenic potential. Second, in the Diabetes Prevention Program, elevated Beck Depression Inventory scores at baseline were not associated with an increased risk of diabetes, but the use of antidepressants was. Third, in our study, all cohort members were treated with only one antidepressant during the entire follow-up period. A high proportion of long-term users probably responded to treatment, as otherwise a switch to another antidepressant would have been indicated. Fourth, in an explorative analysis using the number of days with a diagnosis of depression in the year before the index date as a proxy for depression severity, there was no indication of increased severity in long-term users. Inclusion of this proxy variable into the multivariate models did not affect our main findings."

So there you have it.