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New analysis means that antidepressants can boost up cognitive decline in other folks with dementia. On the identical time, some medicine seem to be much less destructive than others, which is able to assist medical doctors make higher remedy selections, in line with the paper, “Antidepressant use and cognitive decline in sufferers with dementia: a countrywide cohort find out about,” revealed in BMC Drugs.
Antidepressants are regularly used to alleviate signs akin to anxiousness, despair, aggressiveness, and sleep disturbances in dementia victims.
Then again, a brand new observational find out about in response to information from the Swedish Dementia Registry (SveDem) displays that sufferers with dementia who’re handled with antidepressants enjoy an larger cognitive decline in comparison to sufferers who don’t obtain this drugs.
The find out about is in response to a complete research of registry information from 18,740 sufferers, of whom roughly 23% have been handled with antidepressants. All over the process the find out about, a complete of eleven,912 prescriptions of antidepressants have been registered, with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) accounting for 65%.
“Depressive signs can each irritate cognitive decline and impair high quality of lifestyles, so it is very important deal with them. Our effects can assist medical doctors and different well being care execs make a selection antidepressants which can be higher tailored for sufferers with dementia,” says Sara Garcia Ptacek, researcher on the Division of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, and the find out about’s closing creator.
The researchers from Karolinska Institutet and Sahlgrenska College Health center in Gothenburg have adopted the sufferers’ cognitive construction over the years and in comparison each medicated and non-medicated teams in addition to several types of antidepressants.
Despite the fact that it isn’t lately conceivable to resolve whether or not the cognitive impairment is because of the medicine or to the depressive signs themselves, the researchers have been in a position to look that antidepressants have been related to larger cognitive decline.
Variations between medicine
The find out about additionally issues to variations between other medicine. The SSRI escitalopram was once related to the quickest cognitive decline, adopted by way of the SSRIs citalopram and sertraline.
Mirtazapine, which has a distinct mechanism of motion, had much less destructive cognitive have an effect on than escitalopram.
The researchers now need to examine whether or not sure affected person teams, akin to other folks with particular dementia varieties or biomarkers, reply higher or worse to other antidepressants.
“The objective is to search out those subgroups to create extra individualized care,” says Ptacek.
Additional info:
Minjia Mo et al, Antidepressant use and cognitive decline in sufferers with dementia: a countrywide cohort find out about, BMC Drugs (2025). DOI: 10.1186/s12916-025-03851-3
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Antidepressants related to quicker cognitive decline in dementia (2025, February 25)
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