Can Anti-Depressants Cause or Trigger Leaky Gut?
I recently got asked this question by a reader:
Can Anti-Depressants Cause or Trigger Leaky Gut?
My response was that I’ve never heard of or seen any studies on anti-depressants causing or triggering leaky gut.
That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but I don’t have any reason to believe that it would be the case.
Anti-depressants work in a variety of ways. For instance, one of the most popular classes of anti-depressants are SSRIs, which work primarily by preventing Serotonin from getting reabsorbed, which decreases the symptoms of depression because the presence of Sertonin tends to boost mood.
Pretty much all of these drugs need to get broken down and absorbed by our guts, but it happens fairly quickly (partially given the small size of pills), and so I don’t think there would be a huge effect on our guts (or on leaky gut).
That said, there is a huge connection between depression and leaky gut (you’re probably already aware of this, but here’s a 2008 study that was quite conclusive: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18283240). What appears to happen is that overgrowth of certain bacteria in the gut produces toxins (LPS, for instance) that induce depression.
So although I wouldn’t think that anti-depressants would cause leaky gut, I’d expect it to likely already be present.
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