Use of antidepressants and the risk of myocardial infarction in middle-aged and older adults: A matched case-control study

Abstract

Purpose: Antidepressants, specifically selective serotonin reuptake-inhibiting antidepressants (SSRIs), decrease platelet activation and aggregation in in vitro experiments and could therefore decrease the risk of myocardial infarction (MI). However, prior studies addressing this hypothesis showed contradictory results. Our purpose was to investigate the association between the use of any antidepressant drug and incident MI among middle-aged and older adults. Methods: We embedded a case-control study in the prospective Rotterdam Study (1991-2011). Controls were matched to MI cases based on sex and age at the same calendar date, and confounding factors were taken into account as time-varying covariates. The relative risk of MI during current and past use of an antidepressant was analyzed with conditional logistic regression with never use of antidepressant dr