ABOVE: ISTOCK, MIRKO_ROSENAU
The effects of antidepressant exposure during early development can pass down through three generations of offspring—at least in zebrafish. A new study, published today (December 10) in PNAS, reveals that fluoxetine, a commonly used antidepressant that goes by the brand name Prozac, can alter hormone levels and blunt stress responses in an exposed embryo and its descendants.
“The paper is very intriguing,” says Tim Oberlander, a developmental pediatrician at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital who was not involved in this work. The question of whether these medications have a transgenerational effect is “a really important one that requires further study in other animal models, and ultimately, when we have the data, we need to figure out whether it’s also true in humans.”
Fluoxetine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a class of drugs widely used to treat depression as well as other conditions such as obsessive-compulsive ...
