Antidepressants Linked to Sudden Death in Women

[Guest guest]

Research just published in the March 17, 2009, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology links depression to sudden cardiac death (SCD) and fatal coronary heart disease (CHD) in women with no known heart problems. Read more at http://healtnhappyness.blogspot.com/

[Guest guest]

Speaking for myself, I'd like to see the actual numbers and drawn

correlations from the study before I concluded anything at all. I went to

this site, and I see it's associated with what's obviously a sort of New Age

health site that's fundamentally antagonistic toward the medical

establishment, on general principles, and has fans as uninformed as the one

person who posted a comment praising the unfortunately sketchy article by

saying things like that psychiatrists diagnose and prescribe based on mental

disease standards according to something, he's not sure what, written and

codified by Sigmund Freud. This is so far from reality that it's silly. For

decades, and through several major revisions, The reference used to identify

mental and emotional problems has been something called the Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, now approaching time for another

update and revision in light of recent discoveries in both psychology and

neurology. There's little, if anything, left in this book or in the diverse

fields of contemporary psychology and psychiatry that directly hooks up with

any specific belief of Freud's, not to deny at all that his work was seminal

and, for years after his death, persistently, pervasively influential. But

today, no, not really. It's too much to go into.

Also, I'm aware of the well known Boston nurses' study, which this issue

uses as its statistical basis. But the article failed to explain the study

in any meaningful way, leaving me with the impression that the researchers

quoted are making a worthwhile inquiry, but they're not talking about the

results of a scientifically rigorous study that's double blind and

randomized, but rather based on an anecdotal sampling. this approach isn't

worthless for looking for correlations between things, but it's not

definitive, either. I'm guessing that most of us know that there was some

study that seemed to " prove " that cell phone use caused benign brain tumors

of the sort that I happen to have, myself. Well, that was a study done by

the Karolinska institute in Sweden which again was worth doing but had a lot

of things wrong with it, and the jury is still out, like nowhere near a

conclusion, about the cell phone/tumor thing. Personally, I happen to have

one of these tumors, which has caused a lot of damage to me. But I never

even owned a cell phone until after this thing was diagnosed, and I use it

against the opposite ear anyway, so it's all moot. But this study is in that

kind of very gray area. Worthy of further study, but not a warning that

everyone on Prozac is about to drop dead unless they get themselves an ICD

immediately.

bottom line is I wouldn't get too worked up about this if I happened to be

on an SSRI class antidepressant, especially if it was doing me any good

emotionally, hopefully in conjunction with some sort of talk therapy. Any

site on which you can run into something about the medicinal powers of

papaya juice isn't a serious medical or scientific site, not in this

person's world, anyway.

In my humble opinion, of course.