Combining antidepressants, painkillers may be tied to cranial bleeding: Study
If the recent Food and Drug Administration warning wasn’t enough to make you think twice before popping Ibuprofen for every ache and pain, a paper published July 14, should give you pause.
The population-based study, published in the BMJ, found that mixing antidepressants with common painkillers appears to be linked to a higher risk of intracranial bleeding shortly after starting the treatment. The researchers emphasized their finding doesn’t necessarily mean this drug combination causes the bleeding, but it’s a possibility that needs to be explored further.
“Our findings should be interpreted with caution,” Ju-Young Shin, a researcher with the Korea Institute of Drug Safety and Risk Management, and his co-authors wrote. They acknowledged the possibility their results may have been affected by a number of unknown factors, including coding errors or incomplete records, but said the analysis is strong enough that “special attention is needed when patients use both these drugs together.”
The research was based on information in South Korea’s national health database — a vast resource of information about 50 million people who have received treatment through the country’s universal medical system. The researchers focused on the more than 4.1 million patients who began receiving antidepressants for the first time from 2010 to 2013. Of those patients, more than two million were also taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, during the first 30 days in which they took antidepressants. NSAIDs are among the most popular over-the-counter and prescription painkillers internationally and include such well-known names as Advil, Motrin and Aleve.
Shin and his team found during that initial 30-day window of antidepressant use, 742 people experienced intracranial bleeding, with 169 on antidepressants only and 573 taking both antidepressants and NSAIDs. There were no significant differences based on which antidepressants were taken or age of the person. However, the risk appeared greater for men.