Measured by Carotid IMT
Antidepressants and carotid IMT
April 2, 2011 (New Orleans, LA) -- Antidepressant medications might be associated with an increased burden of atherosclerosis as measured by carotid intima-media thickness (IMT), according to new observational data presented today at the American College of Cardiology 2011 Scientific Sessions . The study looked at a large cohort of male twins, enabling researchers to look at antidepressant usage as a whole, but also between brothers where one twin was taking an antidepressant, and the other wasn't.
"What we found was that the twins who were taking the antidepressants had thicker carotid IMT than the twins who were not taking the antidepressants," said lead investigator Dr Amit Shah (Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA). "The size of the effect was about a 5% increase in the carotid IMT, or more quantitatively, a 40-μm increase. Now, to put that into more lay terms, each year that a person lives, naturally their carotid IMT increases by about 10 μm, so the brother who was taking the antidepressants had neck vessels that were four years older than the brother who was not taking the antidepressants in our study."/.../
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