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Several of the medicines prescribed to the people or depressive attacks of other psychiatric unrests would cause an important weight gain. It is what a psychologist and American searcher, Paula J. Caplan, bring back in an article1 lately appeared in the magazine New Scientist.

According to her, these medicines could be in part responsible persons of the obesity epidemic who hit the United States. About 66% of the Americans make the plumpness and close to the half of these are obese, she / it recalls.

The searcher of Harvard makes notice that the antidepressants (amitriptyline as the, the doxepin and the imipramine), the psychorégulateurs (as the lithium and valproic the acidic) and the antipsychotic (as the clozapine, the olanzapine and the chlorpromazine) make enlarge.

For example, after 10 years of treatment to the lithium, 66% of the patients will have taken 10 kg of bodily mass, she / it specifies. And, after one year under olanzapine (an antipsychotic), 30% of the topics will have won 10 kg to 30 kg.

The mechanisms that are at the origin of this gain of weight are again little known. In some cases, estimates that one while playing on the central nervous system, the medicines would cause some hungers. Of other substances, as the antidepressants of the class of the selective inhibitors of the reuptake of the serotonin – whose hand makes Prozac – could alter the metabolism of the patients.

The number of orders of these medicines does not stop increasing since some years, underline Paula J. Caplan. Several people take more than one of these substances at a time, she / it adds. "The physicians often disregard to specify to their patients that these medicines can increase their appetite and to drag a gain of weight," laments the searcher.

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