Phil asked
Can 5 mg of Lexapro (escitalopram) cause a drop in blood pressure to 105/48?
At a glance
- Hypotension (i.e. low blood pressure) isn't a listed side effect of Lexapro based on clinical trial data, but has been reported during postmarketing experience.
- Overall, the risk of experiencing low blood pressure with Lexapro is low.
Answer
Low blood pressure (i.e. hypotension) is not a common side effect of Lexapro (escitalopram).
The prescribing information for Lexapro does not list it as occurring during clinical trials but it has been reported during the post-marketing experience.
Postmarketing reports are voluntary reports of side effects and/or other drug concerns. The FDA describes it as follows:
Because all possible side effects of a drug can't be anticipated based on preapproval studies involving only several hundred to several thousand patients, FDA maintains a system of postmarketing surveillance and risk assessment programs to identify adverse events that did not appear during the drug approval process.
It is always difficult to discern how common or serious reported postmarketing side effects are because they are reported voluntarily from an indeterminant population size and may not even be linked to exposure to the drug in question.
Therefore, even though low blood pressure has been reported for Lexapro, it isn't definitively known whether or not it truly was the cause in reported instances.
The 'Guidelines for the Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder', which goes over antidepressant therapy in great detail, does not associate low blood pressure with SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) drugs, a class which includes Lexapro.
Having said all of the above, the prescribing information for Lexapro does list hypotension (i.e. low blood pressure) as a possible symptom of overdose:
References
- Lexapro Prescribing Information. AccessFDA
- Guidelines for the Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder. Psychiatry Online
