June 17th, 2013 
John BuckShort-term use of antidepressants, combined with stress and a high-fat diet, is associated with long-term increases in body weight, a new animal study finds. The results were presented at The Endocrine Society’s 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
“Our study suggests that short-term exposure to stress and antidepressants, rather than a high-calorie, high-fat diet alone, leads to long-term body weight gain, accompanied with increased bone and spleen weights,” said study lead author Suhyun Lee, a PhD candidate in the medical sciences at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
Antidepressants are among the most prevalent medications today, accounting for millions of prescriptions each year. In the United States, physicians wrote more than 1.5 million prescriptions for antidepressants in 2009, while physicians in Australia wrote more than 12 million of these prescriptions in 2008.
