Psychiatrists find beta-blockers reduce aggression and relieve depressive symptoms

A team of scientists from the University of Oxford in the UK and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that taking beta-blockers, a drug for arrhythmias, reduced the risk of violence by 13%. About the opening writes a magazine PLOS medicine.

Recall that beta-blockers are used to treat arrhythmia, hypertension, angina pectoris and other heart diseases. Also, the drug is effective in the treatment of migraine and helps to alleviate the symptoms of glaucoma. Despite conflicting research data, beta-blockers are also used in the treatment of anxiety and clinical depression. In addition, drugs can be beneficial for people who have trouble controlling their emotions.

The longitudinal study included 1.4 million Swedes who took courses of beta-blockers between 2006 and 2013. From the observations of the subjects, the researchers concluded that in the process of treatment with beta-blockers, the risk of committing violent crimes in people decreased by 13%. At the same time, among the participants in the experiment, the probability of hospitalization due to mental disorders decreased by 8%.

However, this drug also has serious drawbacks. According to the study, people who took beta-blockers were 8% more likely to be hospitalized due to a suicide attempt than those who did not take heart medication. However, information about hospitalized patients varied too much, which is why scientists came to the conclusion that not beta-blockers, but heart problems in anamnesis could push people to commit suicide.

In the future, psychiatrists hope to make the study more accurate, possibly allowing people with emotion control problems to be treated with beta-blockers in the future.