WHICH SIDE? –
OCT. 23, 2025 – Doctors have long known that antidepressants come with side effects for cardiovascular and metabolic health. The end result is something akin to a “sports league table” for 30 different antidepressants based on their side effect profile … “It’s never been done at this scale before and no one’s ever put specific numbers to the amount of weight you’ll put on, or to the amount that your cholesterol goes up,” he says.
The findings are based on existing data, mostly from 8-week drug studies, that altogether represent more than 58,000 patients.
The most frequently prescribed antidepressants in the U.S. — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, like Zoloft and Prozac — tended to have fewer physical side effects, according to the analysis.
Other medications, particularly some of the older drugs, were shown to have more significant impacts.
For example, a person who took nortriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant, could, on average, have an increase in heart rate that was 20 beats higher than the SSRI fluvoxamine. For other medications, the expected weight change could be 4 pounds gained, or lost.
