Help - any experiences of fluoxetine and b'feeding?

[tebay]

This has probably been covered before, but my sis has just been prescribed fluoxetine but is still b'feeding. Her GP says it's fine -- anybody else had any experience of doing both?

Hi tebay...sorry to hear about your sis.

IU was prescribed fluoxetine when i was pregnant for Ante-natal depression and the doc told me it was OK for BF. when I was in hospital after DD, the hospital weren't happy about it as although the BMJ reference manual says its OK, it does get through in breast milk and there have been no long term studies into the effects. short term it can make the baby irritable and sleepy I was told. They changed me to seroxat which also gets through but to a lesser extent and had me leave a week between meds to get the fluoxetine out of my system.

I had a referral to the mother and baby psychiatric unit the day I started on the seroxat, and my consultant there said seroxat wasn't ideal either, and that their drug of choice is sertraline (Lustral) which gets through to a very minor extent.

I've now been taking it for nearly three months and DD is just fine and dandy....and I'm getting better too!!

I also take sertraline, and am bf. No apparent side effects for DS2. Don't know about fluoxetine though sorry.

I was also prescribed fluoxetine when PG in 2003, noone had any problems with me breastfeeding - psychiatrist, pharmracist, consultant obs gynae and midwives were all fine with it. At that point the research suggested that prozac got through in breastmilk, but in such tiny amounts that it didn't affect the baby.

I think what Daisy has said is correct, that these days Sertraline tends to be the preferred med for breastfeeding.

The plus point of Fluoxetine (prozac) is it's the oldest of the modern ADs, so any long term probs are more likely to have been noted than with the other ones.

thanks so much. She's decided not to take anything (with the support of her paedeatrician) so that she can b'feed, knowing that if things get really bad she can go back on to something else.