Guillain-Barre syndrome following zimeldine treatment
Jan Fagius; Per Olof Osterman; Åke Sidén; B.-E. Wiholm
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry1985
Summary (paraphrased)
The authors review thirteen cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, all with a similar temporal relationship to recent commencement of the antidepressant zimelidine. They estimate the risk of developing the syndrome was increased about 25-fold among patients receiving the drug compared with the disorder's natural incidence. They conclude the case series provides strong evidence that the syndrome can occur as a specific, probably immunologically mediated complication of zimelidine therapy.
Why it’s in the corpus
primary evidence for the GBS signal that withdrew the first SSRI
Why it’s in the systems review
This is the primary clinical evidence behind the only SSRI-market withdrawal in history, so it earns its place as the documented anchor of the corpus's drug-safety-history strand. The ~25-fold risk estimate and the explicitly immunological framing matter for the user's stated interest in immune-system-related mechanisms of post-drug syndromes. It also illustrates the corpus's honest-status ethos: rare, severe, mechanistically unexplained harms were what ended Zelmid, and the paper is explicit about the immunological inference being probable rather than proven.
Related records
- Peer-reviewed paper
Divergence and convergence of commercial and scientific priorities in drug development: The case of Zelmid, the first SSRI antidepressant
Shai Mulinari · Social Science & Medicine
Drawing on interviews with industry and academic scientists involved in the Zelmid project plus textual sources, the paper reconstructs the development of the first SSRI to reach the market. Zelmid (zimelidine) was synthesized in 1971, launched by the Swedish…
MECH-0452015PSSDSystems review · Oct 2026