Yawning is found in almost all animals including reptiles. Several Medications are known to give rise to excessive yawning. This unusual, under recognised and usually ignored side effect can cause the sufferers to have severe problems. We hereby present a case of intractable yawning in an individual on an SSRI namely fluoxetine. There was a clear temporal relationship i. Though considered as safest antidepressants, they have some common side effects which include gastrointestinal side effects, headache and at times sexual dysfunction. Yawning is one of the rare side effects of SSRIs. SSRIs were found to be the commonest cause of not so common drug induced yawning in a meta-analysis 1. Isolated cases of intractable yawning have been reported with citalopram 2 fluoxetine, citalopram and sertraline 3 in the literature.
From the bizarre pleasure of a spontaneous orgasm to the libido-crushing agony of episodic impotence, antidepressant drugs have long been known to carry the risk of sexual side effects. Most of these unintended effects are negative; some are just plain weird. And at the forefront of strange results, users have had orgasms while exercising, shopping — and yawning. This “yawning orgasm” has been reported by patients using Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin and other antidepressant drugs. As many as 5 percent of patients experience the side effect, experts say, though the orgasms may be widely underreported: They have been discovered only “coincidentally during routine side-effect queries,” according to one group of researchers, who suspected that patients may be “unwilling to reveal the experience. Not all out-of-the-blue orgasms were yawn-related. A pill that eases depression and might induce spontaneous orgasms sounds great. But for almost everyone taking antidepressants, the sexual side effects are usually the opposite, resulting in lowered libido and the inability to achieve orgasm anorgasmia. A lucky few can reach a climax when they least expect it, but many more patients can’t get there at all.
Antidepressant induced excessive yawning has been described as a possible side effect of pharmacotherapy. A syndrome of indifference has also been described as another possible side effect. The frequency of those phenomena and their physiopathology are unknown. They are both considered benign and reversible after antidepressant discontinuation but severe cases with complications as temporomandibular lesions, have been described. We report two unprecedented cases in which excessive yawning and indifference occurred simultaneously as side effects of antidepressant therapy, discussing possible physiopathological mechanisms for this co-occurrence. Induction of indifference and excessive yawning may be modulated by serotonergic and noradrenergic mechanisms. One proposal to unify these side effects would be enhancement of serotonin in midbrain, especially paraventricular and raphe nucleus. Key words: Adverse effects; antidepressive agents; apathy; serotonin uptake inhibitors; yawning. Alguns relatos de caso descrevem pacientes com bocejos excessivos induzidos por antidepressivos.