We all pretty much expect antidepressants to do one thing: help us out by balancing the chemicals in your brain, called neurotransmitters, that affect your mood and emotions. WebMD also outlines that these depression medications can help improve your mood, help you sleep better, sometimes increase your appetite and can even aid in concentration. They are a positive benefit to anyone's life who is suffering with depression. A new study though, highlights that this medication can do more than just that, as they found they can help relieve your body of lower back pain, too.

A new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, at the beginning of October shows that there is more that an antidepressant can do then just balancing chemicals in our brains.

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The study consisted of a clinical trial of 146 people who suffer from chronic low back pain, where the use of a low-dose amitriptyline (antidepressant) did not demonstrate an improvement in pain, disability, or work at 6 months compared with an active comparator. However, there was a reduction in disability at 3 months, an improvement in pain intensity that was nonsignificant at the 6 month point, and minimal adverse events reported for the treatment group.

The thing is that while the physical source of lower back pain can often be identified through tests, the mental and emotional toll of stress and depression tends to make the initial problem even worse.

Dr. Charla Fischer, associate professor of orthopedic surgery at New York University’s School of Medicine shared that whenever antidepressants are added to a patients treatment regimen that they are not bothered by the pain as much. Furthermore, their pain scores were found to be the same on a daily basis, however, their mental outlook on the pain is what shifted. While it's difficult to really decipher which parts of the pain were from physical factors and which was a result of stress, it is a great starting point to learn more.

These results indicated that low-dose amitriptyline could be an effective treatment for chronic low back pain. Though there will be much larger scale trial needed to be done to truly confirm these findings, it might be worth a try for these individuals, especially if the alternative is opioids.

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