Shocking, I know.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-yo...confirmed/

Headline should be "...some antidepressant drugs..."

(07-09-2015 11:10 AM)Hitch Wrote:  Headline should be "...some antidepressant drugs..."

Well, yeah but that should be assumed given there like a thousand antidepressant drugs at this point.

It never ceases to amaze me how the media can twist any story to fit their bias. Read the WaPo (link in first post) and then the Wall Street Journal

Birth defect risk from antidepressants is seen as small

Since many of you can't access the WSJ, here's some of their highlights:

Quote:The study... found associations between certain birth defects and two antidepressants—Prozac... and Paxil...

But it found no such links with three other antidepressants: Zoloft... the drug taken by most participants in the study’s control group, who were in treatment for depression, as well as Celexa... and Lexapro...

Quote:But the increase in absolute risk was small, they said. For example, the risk of anencephaly in the children of women taking paroxetine would be seven in 10,000 instead of two in 10,000. For one of the heart defects, the risk rises to 24 in 10,000 from 10 in 10,000.

So there goes the WaPo trying to exacerbate hysteria amongst a group of people already hysterical when the simple issue is to prescribe Zoloft instead of Prozac.

And the suicide rate for untreated depression is as high as 1,500 per 10,000.

(07-09-2015 12:03 PM)QuestionSocratic Wrote:  It never ceases to amaze me how the media can twist any story to fit their bias. Read the WaPo (link in first post) and then the Wall Street Journal

Birth defect risk from antidepressants is seen as small

Since many of you can't access the WSJ, here's some of their highlights:

Quote:The study... found associations between certain birth defects and two antidepressants—Prozac... and Paxil...

But it found no such links with three other antidepressants: Zoloft... the drug taken by most participants in the study’s control group, who were in treatment for depression, as well as Celexa... and Lexapro...

Quote:But the increase in absolute risk was small, they said. For example, the risk of anencephaly in the children of women taking paroxetine would be seven in 10,000 instead of two in 10,000. For one of the heart defects, the risk rises to 24 in 10,000 from 10 in 10,000.

So there goes the WaPo trying to exacerbate hysteria amongst a group of people already hysterical when the simple issue is to prescribe Zoloft instead of Prozac.

Funny, my wife was taken OFF Lexapro and ON Prozac because of the LOWER risk. This was for both pregnancies. The second is due in October, but the first certainly doesn't have defects.

(07-09-2015 12:08 PM)EverRespect Wrote:  

(07-09-2015 12:03 PM)QuestionSocratic Wrote:  It never ceases to amaze me how the media can twist any story to fit their bias. Read the WaPo (link in first post) and then the Wall Street Journal

Birth defect risk from antidepressants is seen as small

Since many of you can't access the WSJ, here's some of their highlights:

Quote:The study... found associations between certain birth defects and two antidepressants—Prozac... and Paxil...

But it found no such links with three other antidepressants: Zoloft... the drug taken by most participants in the study’s control group, who were in treatment for depression, as well as Celexa... and Lexapro...

Quote:But the increase in absolute risk was small, they said. For example, the risk of anencephaly in the children of women taking paroxetine would be seven in 10,000 instead of two in 10,000. For one of the heart defects, the risk rises to 24 in 10,000 from 10 in 10,000.

So there goes the WaPo trying to exacerbate hysteria amongst a group of people already hysterical when the simple issue is to prescribe Zoloft instead of Prozac.

Funny, my wife was taken OFF Lexapro and ON Prozac because of the LOWER risk. This was for both pregnancies. The second is due in October, but the first certainly doesn't have defects.

At age of 71, I'm on several drugs for colesterol and high blood pressure. When I read the warnings, I'd assume there is no way I haven't died yet. Pharmaceuticals have done more to improve people's health than any other medical advance in the last 200 years and yet Big Pharma is the boogeyman of the world.

And , good luck to your wife.

We've had 2 children while on prozac. Both turned out fine.

(07-09-2015 12:32 PM)dfarr Wrote:  We've had 2 children while on prozac. Both turned out fine.

Well I guess the study is false then.

(07-09-2015 12:08 PM)EverRespect Wrote:  Funny, my wife was taken OFF Lexapro and ON Prozac because of the LOWER risk. This was for both pregnancies. The second is due in October, but the first certainly doesn't have defects.

Congrats.

The TV Report I heard said that the study that was released showed only a correlation between taking the drug and birth defects.

Link between some antidepressants and birth defects is confirmed - The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-yo...confirmed/ Wrote:Birth defects are alarmingly common, affecting one in every 33 babies born in the United States
...
Reefhuis said that while the associations were clear in their study, the absolute risk to the babies appeared to be small. For instance, the risk of anencephaly for children of women who take paroxetine would increase from 2 per 10,000 to 7 per 10,000.

The article provides no real perspective on how these numbers mesh up.

Put in perspective, the NIH says that 1 in 1000 pregnancies (but 1 in 10,000 live births) results in anencephaly. So, the increase in incidence is from 10 in 10,000 to 12-17 in 10,000 for this one selected type of birth defect. If there is no genuine association and this were just a statistical anomaly, then you may suspect there were other types of birth defect that changed from 10 in 10k to 4 in 10k, and those weren't reported here because they were not interesting to the topic at hand... they just cherry picked the one element of many that was the most dramatic, and didn't provide much perspective in it. In this case, anencephaly would represent 10/300, or about 3.3% of all birth defects.

The research sounds like a research project to find out if more research is needed, and they got results that got them funded to do more research. I don't think there is anything more significant than that in these results. It means a lot to the researchers (because they get to feed their families for a few more years) but nothing much at all to anyone else.