Antidepressants and testicular cancer

Purpose

Re-examine association of fluoxetine and paroxetine with risk of testicular cancer noted in drug screening, with 4 years more follow-up and expanded study of these and other antidepressant drugs.

Methods

In the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Northern California, 906 men with testicular cancer diagnosed August 1996–December 2010 were compared with 38,253 matched controls with race/ethnicity recorded regarding receipt of antidepressant drugs at least 2 years before diagnosis or control index date. Analyses emphasized duration of use and histological subgroups.

Results

With control for race/ethnicity and use of other antidepressant drugs, odds ratios (OR) and 95 % confidence intervals (CI) for associations with testicular cancer were as follows: fluoxetine 1.22 (0.88–1.71), paroxetine 1.19 (0.78–1.83), and 1.21 (0.92–1.58) for all serotonin reuptake inhibitors. There was no statistically significant association with risk of all testicular cancers or their histological subtypes for any individual drug or for tricyclics or all antidepressants combined except for citalopram with all testicular cancers 2.55 (1.43–4.52) and those of mixed histology 4.36 (1.50–12.68) and nefazodone with embryonal cancers 9.79 (1.85–51.81). These could readily be chance findings in the context of the many analyses that were performed. Duration of use was not associated with risk of the drugs and drug groups with sufficient numbers of exposed cases for analysis.

Conclusions

We found little evidence to support a testicular carcinogenic effect of fluoxetine, paroxetine, or other antidepressant drugs, but a weakly positive association is not ruled out. The signals in prior screening may have been due to chance and/or uncontrolled confounding.