Dr. Weeks’ Comment: Increase suicide, increased violence (“Prozac defense”), implication in school shootings, sleep disruption “Prozac eyes” – all these are horrible yet entirely predictable untoward consequences of using this class of drug and now we can add dental implant failure to the list of side-effects which your psychiatrist or your naive primary care doctor (why is this doctor prescribing dangerous mood altering drugs beyond his or her specialty training) never told you about…. more and more patients are lawyering up. I have warned the doctors whom I mentor to stop prescribing this class of drug.
Use of SSRIs Associated With Dental Implant Failure
ALEXANDRIA, Va — September 3, 2014 — According to a study published in the Journal of Dental Research, use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) is linked to an increased risk of osseointegrated implant failure.
SSRIs, the most widely used drugs for the treatment of depression, have been reported to reduce bone formation and increase the risk of bone fracture. Since osseointegration is influenced by bone metabolism, Khadijeh Al-Abedalla, MD, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, and colleagues investigated the association between SSRIs and the risk of failures in osseointegrated implants.
The retrospective cohort study was conducted on patients treated with dental implants from January 2007 to January 2013. A total of 916 dental implants in 490 patients (94 implants on 51 patients using SSRIs) were used to estimate the risk of failure associated with the use of SSRIs.
After 3 to 67 months of follow-up, 38 dental implants failed and 784 succeeded in non-users while 10 failed and 84 succeeded in SSRIs-users.
SSRIs usage was associated with an increased risk of dental implants failure (hazard ratio [HR] = 2.31; P< .01). The failure rates were 4.6% for SSRI non-users and 10.6% SSRI users, respectively.
Small implant diameters (≤4 mm; P = .01), bone augmentation (P = .04), and smoking habits (P< .01) were also associated with higher risk of implant failure.
The main limitation of the study was that drug compliance and treatment period could not be acquired from the files of the patients.
SOURCE: International Association for Dental Research