A new study published in BMC Medicine finds that antidepressants are associated with faster cognitive decline in people with dementia. Escitalopram (Lexapro) was the antidepressant associated with the most severe cognitive decline, followed by citalopram (Celexa).
The study, led by Minjia Mo of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, additionally finds that high doses of SSRIs were linked to increased risk of death, fractures, and severe dementia. The authors note that while antidepressants were linked to lower cognitive test scores, these lower scores were most typically not considered clinically significant.
Despite antidepressants not being approved to treat dementia or its behavioral symptoms, a 2020 study published in JAMA found that nearly half (49.8%) of dementia patients were prescribed these drugs. The current findings call into question the narrative that these drugs can be safely prescribed to people with dementia as well as the ethics of practitioners writing these prescriptions despite broad knowledge that “antidepressant use in dementia is not only ineffective but potentially harmful.”
The authors write:
“In this nationwide cohort study, we found that the current use of antidepressants was associated with faster cognitive decline in patients with dementia compared with non-use, and this association was driven mainly by patients with severe dementia. Higher dispensed doses of SSRIs were associated with more cognitive decline during follow-up, and higher risk of severe dementia, fracture, and all-cause mortality.”
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This is ancient research insight people. We knew this a decade ago. I know you need to give your life a semblance of illusory meaning in order to keep your head above the waterline, but please, find your meaning in something true, not this wasted effort to make a big story out of nada, because that is you sheltering in the illusion of your non-impotence in the face of that which you criticize and have been criticizing since the 70s with no change whatsoever. It’s like the environmentalists who protest even though it does nothing to halt the inexorable slide towards human destruction of the natural environment. Why are you afraid of the truth? Do you think it could disadvantage you? Then that disadvantage is a disadvantage only of the advantage that was always evil and false anyway, for even now it opposes the truth, and by identifying with it, SO DO YOU. If we can’t meet on the page of truth then you can’t even meet yourself hence you’re just a hunk of meat + the illusions that control you.
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“Antidepressants in” ALL “Patients Increase Risk of Death.” So let’s hope and pray the “professionals,” who are handing these neurotoxins out like candy, some day learn this.
And a little reminder, “the measure of society is how it treats the weakest members.” So neurotoxic poisoning the children is morally reprehensible, as is neurotoxic poisoning the elderly … but so is neurotoxic poisoning anyone. Wake up, doctors!
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The “forced swim test,” also known as the Porsolt test, is a behavioral experiment where rodents are placed in a container of water from which they cannot escape, used to assess antidepressant efficacy and model depressive-like behavior.
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I always find it fascinating how they claim that brain chemistry faults cause “depression,” but when they want to induce depression in rats or other animals, they always put them under stress and fear for their lives! It’s almost as if traumatic experiences cause the animals to be depressed…
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