SSRIs are a class of widely used antidepressants which include Prozac, Lexapro, Luvox, Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft.

In my last blog entry, I talked about the possible impact of SSRIs on male fertility and male sexuality. I've since been able to communicate with one of the authors of the study that found DNA damage in the sperm of a number of research subjects who were given SSRIs. Here's how they did the study:
They recruited normal healthy volunteers (without depression) who are between the ages to 18 to 65 years. Volunteers had no medical problems, took no medications, did not smoke, use illicit drugs, or consume significant amounts of alcohol, had no psychiatric illnesses and were not attempting to conceive. They were also required to have a normal baseline semen analysis at entry.

Given that this was an exploratory study to determine if further inquiry is merited, there was not a control arm and it was not a double-blind study. However, given the amount of sperm damage that these researchers found in such a short amount of time, I do believe that healthcare providers would be wise to actually attempt to determine whether patients need to be taking SSRI antidepressants before prescribing them.

What a change this would be!

Granted, we expect rather a lot of healthcare providers. We give them little mental health training and allot them something like fifteen minutes to cure all that ails a patient. Throwing a pill at anything that even sounds like depression is one side effect of a healthcare system that has pretty much cut out actual therapy. So instead of evaluating depression correctly--which is a time consuming process--I fear they will now start throwing another class of pills at it.