LA Times, June 12, 2018.
The incidence of depression has been rising in the U.S. for more than a decade. So has Americans’ reliance on prescription medications that list depression as a possible side effect.
The researchers, led by Dr. Dima Mazen Qato of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, conducted the same analysis with medications that did not list depression as a possible side effect. In this case, the prevalence of depression among those who didn’t take any such drugs (5.5%) was not significantly different statistically from the prevalence for those who took one or more medications not linked to depression. The rates of depression among this group were 6.6% for those taking one drug, 5.1% for those taking two, and 6% for those taking three or more.