Antidepressant use nearly doubled kids’ risk of diabetes in new study

Is this one of the reasons diabetes rates are off the charts?

By all accounts, type 2 diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S.

And children and young adults are being hit the hardest — even though, not too long ago, type 2 was practically unheard of in kids.

Of course, if you ask experts why there’s been such an increase, you’ll hear the usual — bad food choices, too little exercise, and the answer we’ve been given for practically every single one of today’s ills, obesity.

That, however, isn’t all that’s going on here.

Because right along with that increase in kids diagnosed with diabetes, there’s been something else on the rise — something that, as a new study has found, could be the big reason why so many children are facing a lifetime of insulin and needles.

But if there’s any good news to come out of this research, it’s the fact that this risk appears, thank goodness, to be reversible in many cases.

A long overdue study
We’ve been allowing Big Pharma to conduct a huge experiment on our kids and grandkids… and more results from it have just come back.

They’re shocking, to say the least.

It appears that doctors have become so blasé in handing out prescriptions for heavy-duty antidepressants to children (some mere toddlers!), that they haven’t even stopped to realize what it may be doing to them over the long term.

Although previous studies had already shown a link between these drugs and an increase of type 2 diabetes in adults, it wasn’t until now that anyone had bothered to find out if that also applied to kids!

But finally, a group of researchers took a long hard look. And the results should make doctors, educators, and health officials realize that we need to take a giant step back right now.

Dr. Mehmet Burcu and researchers from two mainstream institutions — the University of Maryland School of Medicine and School of Pharmacy — examined Medicaid records for nearly 120,000 children and adolescents between the ages of 5 and 20 years old who lived in several states all across the U.S.

They had all been prescribed antidepressants for issues such as depression, anxiety, and ADHD.

And the findings, just published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, were eye-opening.

Of the 233 patients who had type 2 diabetes, 156 were still on the drugs. Only 77 of those who no longer used antidepressants had the disease — meaning that the danger was nearly doubled by long-term use.

That risk, however, was found to be even greater among those taking a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Several years ago, the data company IMS Health found that over 80,000 prescriptions for the SSRI drug Prozac were written for mere tots in 2014 — little children under the age of 2!

Even the permissive, pharma-friendly FDA only approved that drug to be given to kids as young as 7 (which, on its own, is shocking).

And, as Dr. Burcu pointed out, antidepressants “are one of the most commonly used psychotropic medication classes” taken by kids in the U.S., with the SSRI varieties being prescribed the most.

That’s why it’s time for parents and grandparents to take a firm stance on this issue — and to stop, look, and listen before allowing any child we love to be prescribed these meds.

And that’s no matter what you may be told by a doctor, teacher, or principal regarding depression, ADHD, or anything else they might pull out of Big Pharma’s oversized hat of conditions.

Some good news here is that more parents are realizing how risky these drugs are… and learning how eliminating certain foods and food additives is not only a common-sense approach, but it’s one that really works.

HSI panel member Dr. Allan Spreen has been supporting those kinds of dietary approaches for years. He says that many kids who are hyperactive are also chemically sensitive, and that the improvements with some simple dietary changes “can be absolutely amazing.”

Some of the worst offenders where these kids are concerned are artificial colors, preservatives, MSG, and aspartame.

But drugs, such as the ones in this study, shouldn’t even be on the radar.

“Study finds link between antidepressant use and type 2 diabetes in youth” University of Maryland, Baltimore, October 23, 2017, newswise.com