Various ways can be done to treat diseases, such as therapy or medication. Usually, the given medications are chemical drugs or traditional drugs that mixed from herbal ingredients. Every medicine would have their side effect, especially if people consumed it for the long term.

Most people regularly consume various medicines such as contraceptive pills, blood pressure medication, painkiller, and heart medicine to maintain their health. Those medicines have side effect potentials, such as depression and suicide. As a matter of fact, those side effects might occur without us knowing. According to research conducted by the University of Illinois in Chicago, people who consumed medicine with depression and suicide side effects have huge potential to do such things.

Those researchers analysed the pattern of drug use of 26192 participants (which gathered from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) from 2005 until 2014. The result showed that someone who didn’t use any medicine has depression potential of around 5%. This potential will increase if he/she starts to consume a medicine with depression side effect. And for people who consumed a type of medicine (with depression side effect), the depression potential will rise to 7%, while for people who consumed 2-3 medicine (polypharmacy), they will have 9-15% potential for depression.

Also, they conducted another analysis of suicidal thought as the side effect of medication. The potential will increase along with how much medicine a person consumed. For those who consumed medication without suicidal thoughts as a side effect, they have 5% probability of conducting suicide. For those who consumed a type of medicine (with suicidal thoughts as a side effect), the potential is 8%. The potential will increase for those who consumed 2-3 types of medicine at the same time, which rated at 12-18%.

Text by Anggie Triana
Stock photos from Pixabay.com

Source(s):

• Qato, D. M., Ozenberger, K., and Olfson, M. (2018). Prevalence of Prescription Medications With Depression as a Potential Adverse Effect Among Adults in the United States. Journal of the American Medical Association, 319(22): 2289-2298, DOI: 10.1001/jama.2018.6741.
• Depression: Common medication side effect? (2018). https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/depression-common-medication-side-effect-2018071614259?utm_source=delivra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=BF20180723-Depression&utm_id=983585&dlv-ga-memberid=55984167&mid=55984167&ml=983585, August 14, 2018.