PORTUGAL: Researchers reported that lasting depression in COVID-19 survivors might be highly treatable in the 34th European College Neuro-Psychopharmacology (ECNP) meeting recently held in Lisbon, Portugal.
The patient's immune response to COVID-19 and related severe systemic inflammation has seemed to be the main mechanism contributing to the development of post-COVID depression.
Researchers presented the abstract of the study "Rapid antidepressant response to first-line selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in post-COVID-19 depression" in the meeting.
According to the study, doctors treated fifty-eight patients who had developed depression after going through COVID-19 with Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), the widely used antidepressant drugs. SSRIs have some anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties.
The drugs used for the study included sertraline, sold by Pfizer under the brand name Zoloft, GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil (paroxetine), Eli Lilly and Co's Prozac (fluoxetine) and AbbVie's Celexa (citalopram).
Usually, about 66 per cent of patients show improvement with SSRIs. However, in the case of post-COVID-19 depression, researchers reported that 91 per cent responded to treatment within four weeks.
A doctor of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who was not part of the study, said in a statement that these findings have been significant for survivors with the syndrome of persistent symptoms known as Long COVID, which often includes depression.
