![]() ![]() ![]() Harmer says the study would have been more useful if the participants had also been asked if they experienced blunted emotions while taking the antidepressant.Antidepressants may cause emotional blunting - a lack of feeling for both happiness and sadness - and make it less likely for people to use positive and negative feedback to complete tasks, according to a new study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. “I don’t think this result explains why people have this effect, but it may be a marker of it, which could be useful when we come to develop new treatments that don’t have it.” “Why antidepressants cause emotional blunting in a subset of people is a really important question,” says Catherine Harmer at the University of Oxford. “I hope it would make doctors have a discussion with patients about potential side effects.” “I hope this doesn’t make doctors more cautious about prescribing antidepressants as they’re extremely important drugs,” she says. But the medicines can also blunt the intensity of negative feelings, which can be helpful, she adds. The finding suggests that SSRIs reduce people’s sensitivity to rewards or other pleasurable experiences, says Sahakian. Other tests showed that the medicine didn’t reduce their cognitive abilities in other ways. The participants who took the antidepressant were 23 per cent less sensitive to the stimuli switch than those taking the placebo, as measured by how quickly they changed their stimulus selections. Then the probabilities of a reward for each stimulus would switch and the participants had to learn this new system. Through trial and error, they generally learned that one stimulus led to a reward more often than the other. One task measured how well they learned from rewards, with people having to repeatedly choose between two stimuli. ![]() After three weeks, the participants carried out a range of tasks involving memory and learning. The researchers gave either a commonly prescribed SSRI called escitalopram or placebo pills to 66 people without depression. Fresh ideas about the causes of depression are bringing new treatmentsīy upending the idea that a chemical imbalance in the brain is behind depression, we are starting to understand some of its mysteries and develop better treatments ![]()
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