Risk of new-onset diabetes increases in antidepressant users – Meta-analysis

Antidepressant Drugs (ADs) are among the most commonly prescribed medications in developed countries. The available epidemiological evidence suggests an association between AD use and higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Considering this fact,researchers at the ASST Fatebenefratelli-Sacco in Milan, Italy, and the University of Eastern Piedmont in Novara, Italy, set out to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the risk for diabetes associated with AD use in a systematic literature review of relevant studies in PubMed, PsychINFO, and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts. The updated meta-analysis, recently published in PLoS One, confirmed the association between AD use and the risk for T2D.

The studies, published between January 1, 2000, and December 31, 2016 and published only in the English language and those that included participants aged at least 18 years were included in the meta-analysis.

In the systematic literature search conducted to identify relevant studies in MEDLINE (PubMed), PsycINFO, and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) only studies assessing the incidence of new-onset diabetes in subjects treated with ADs were included and results were pooled using a random-effects meta-analysis. Moreover, The researchers extensively reviewed the role of the different sources of bias that have been proposed to explain the association between AD and diabetes. Twenty studies met the inclusion criteria. In the meta-analysis, the association between AD use and diabetes was still evident after the inclusion of the recent negative studies [pooled relative risk = 1.27, 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.19–1.35; p<0.001]. None of the biases proposed by previous authors seemed able to fully explain the observed association.

The updated meta-analysis confirmed the association between Anti Depressant use and incidence of diabetes. It still remains a matter of debate whether single ADs exert a different effect on the risk of diabetes. Given the possible heterogeneity, the authors suggested that a classification of Anti Depressants according to their pharmacological profiles could be useful in better elucidating the nature of this association.

For more details click on the link: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0182088