In a landmark achievement for the field of women’s physical and mental health and wellness, the Food and Drug Administration announced Friday that it had approved the first-ever pill treatment for postpartum depression. Zuralone will eventually be available as a fast-acting once-a-day prescription pill taken as a two-week course.
Postpartum depression (PPD) is different from the “baby blues,” which is an antiquated term, where people who have just given birth experience short-lived sadness, irritability, or mood swings. PPD is a much more serious, longer-lasting syndrome affecting those who have just given birth, afflicting them with anxiety, depression, sadness, rage, guilt, or any mixture of challenging emotions that seem insurmountable. It’s often marked by a feeling of failure and an inability to bond with the new baby. Some women even become suicidal very quickly.
Until now, the only widely available treatment for PPD has been traditional anti-depressants, such as Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which take weeks to start working and months to reach their full effect when sufferers of PPD need help sooner. And while many of the social factors that contribute to PPD are similar to those that contribute to general depression, the huge drop in estrogen and progesterone after pregnancy is thought to be the main contributor, and SSRIs don’t address that cause.
Zuralone, on the other hand, starts to work almost immediately, within a few days, which is the most impressive thing about this new drug. It also addresses the hormone drop, making it tailor-made for postpartum issues. Zuralone is “a positive allosteric modulator of synaptic and extrasynaptic GABAA receptors and neuroactive steroid,” according to the American Journal of Psychiatry. And while that description is quite a mouthful, it simply means that Zuralone works synthetically as a byproduct of progesterone (a female steroid) and helps the GABA receptors process stress more effectively.
As Kristina Deligiannidis, a psychiatrist who led the clinical trials at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York, put it to Wired Magazine, zuranolone works by “resetting the neural circuits back to normal functioning, so that the brain can handle stress as it should.”
Recorded side effects in a study of Zuranolone included drowsiness, dizziness, headache, diarrhea, and nausea, which doesn’t sound like a great profile, but you would be surprised how many popular and oh-so-ubiquitous drugs on the market have similar or even worse-sounding potential repercussions. And most people won’t experience all or maybe even any of them.
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