Antidepressant Does Not Improve Stomach Disorder Symptoms

It turns out that antidepressants don't improve symptoms for a stomach disorder. Scientists found that the use of the antidepressant nortriptyline did not help patients with idiopathic (of unknown causes) gastoparesis. The findings reveal that researchers will have to continue the hunt for treatments when it comes to treating this particular condition.

Gastroparesis is a disease of the muscles of the stomach or the nerves controlling these muscles. It causes the muscles to stop working, which can result in inadequate grinding of food by the stomach and poor emptying of food from the stomach into the intestine. It's a difficult syndrome to manage, and there are very few effective treatments. In fact, one possible approach to treatment is based on the idea that some of the symptoms arise because of changes in certain nerves. Tricyclic antidepressants are a category of drug that are often used to treat refractory symptoms of nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. In order to see if these drugs worked, the scientists looked at them a bit more closely.

The researchers randomized 130 patients with idiopathic gastroparesis to nortriptyline or placebo. This allowed them to determine whether treatment with the antidepressant resulted in improvement of symptoms.

So what did they find? It turns out that the proportion of patients experiencing symptomatic improvement on two visits did not differ between the treatment groups. There were also no treatment group differences in measures of nausea, fullness or early satiety, or bloating. Treatment was also stopped more often in the nortriptyline group than in the placebo group, but numbers of adverse events were not different.

"Our results raise general doubts about the utility of tricyclic antidepressants in low doses as a strategy for the treatment of idiopathic gastroparesis," write the authors in a news release.

The findings are published in the journal JAMA.