Plasma antidepressant levels and clinical condition were measured sequentially for at least 24 hr in eight patients who presented with acute antidepressant overdosage. There was no evidence to suggest that a knowledge of the drug plasma levels had anything to offer in the management of a patient whose overdose included a tricyclic antidepressant.

WHAT IS KNOWN AND OBJECTIVE Abundant clinical data now confirm that ketamine produces a remarkable rapid-onset antidepressant effect - hours or days - in contrast to the delayed onset (typically weeks) of current antidepressant drugs. This surprising and revolutionary finding may lead to the development of life-saving pharmacotherapy for depressive illness by reducing the high suicide risk asso...

BACKGROUND Different classes of antidepressant drugs are used as a treatment for depression by activating the catecholinergic system. In addition, depression has been associated with decrease of growth factors, which causes insufficient axonal sprouting and reduced neuronal damage repair. In this study, antidepressant treatments are analyzed in a cell culture system, to study the modulation of ...

OBJECTIVE Antidepressants do not differ significantly in their ability to treat depression. Excluding the tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), these drugs also do not differ significantly in their incidence of adverse events. Therefore, the initial choice of antidepressant medication should be based, in part, on cost. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact on utilization and costs ...

Introduction Efficacy and safety of antidepressant drug therapy may be limited by inter-individual differences in concentration. Accounting for this inter-individuality, Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) enables clinicians to adjust dosage based on individual information concentration attained blood. However, research the basic assumption TDM, association between effect, has yielded ambiguous r...

OBJECTIVE To determine if antidepressant drug usage is associated with cognitive impairment or dementia, including Alzheimer disease (AD). METHOD We conducted a systematic search of Medline, PubMed, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Embase, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library. An initial screen by abstracts and titles was performed, and relevant full articles were then reviewed and assessed for their me...

Recently, we reported that a centrally acting non-narcotic antitussive (cough suppressant drug), tipepidine produces an antidepressant-like effect in the forced swimming test in rats. Because pharmacological properties of tipepidine apparently differ from those of typical antidepressants developed to date, we speculated that caramiphen, another centrally acting antitussive, has an antidepressan...

Weight gain is a common, but often overlooked side effect to many widely used drugs. In susceptible individuals the weight gain may result in clinically significant obesity and associated comorbidities. Both tricyclic antidepressant medications and antipsychotic compounds are those prominently cited for producing persistent and problematic body weight gain in many treated patients and have a se...

BACKGROUND To determine the efficacy, safety and tolerability of antidepressants in depressed elderly patients. METHODS Search for randomized controlled double-blind studies evaluating atypical antidepressants (ATYPs), reversible inhibitors of monoamine oxidase-A, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and tricyclic antidepressants in moderate/severe depressed patients > or = 60 year...

BACKGROUND The evidence base for long term antidepressant pharmacotherapy is limited. This review describes long-term outcomes of antidepressant-treated depression during the modern pharmacological era (post-1988). METHODS Review of Medline, PsycInfo, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library using keywords and controlled vocabulary terms for long-term outcome studies (10 years or more) of antidepress...