A 36-year-old woman with two children visited a psychiatric outpatient clinic on an ambulatory basis. She had no history of endocrine or reproductive pathology or psychiatric problems. Although she had been receiving a conservative treatment for iron deficiency anemia and transient hematuria, there was no specific hematologic and nephrologic finding and she had not taken any dopamine antagonistic agents including gastrointestinal motility drugs and antipsychotic agents except ferrous sulfate. Her son had been diagnosed with pervasive development disorder and mental retardation. She had suffered symptoms of depressed mood, nihilistic ideation, decreased volition, decreased psychomotor activity, loss of appetite, and sleep disturbance, which occurred after her son's diagnosis 2 years ago. Diagnostic tests were performed to ascertain whether she had neurologic or any other systemic organic disease that could explain her symptoms. Following a detailed psychiatric examination with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID-I), escitalopram 10 mg per day was prescribed to the patient with the diagnosis of major depressive disorder. She scored 26 on the Hamilton rating scale for depression (HRSD), and 25 on the Beck depression inventory (BDI)., After 2 weeks of medication, her complaints declined, her HRSD score was 18 and her BDI score further decreased to 20. However, she developed galactorrhea with breast pain (the nonpuerperal discharge of milk-containing fluid from the breast). She had no history of galactorrhea. She first noticed the discharge on treatment day 14 and described it as white-creamy and from both nipples. She did not notice any bloody, greenish, or foul-smelling discharge nor report sexual dysfunction. She consulted her gynecologist, who recommended mammography and breast ultrasonography. The results of these tests were normal. However, serum prolactin level on treatment day 14 was 200 ng/mL (reference range: 1.2-24.2 ng/mL). There were no abnormalities in blood chemistry, thyroid function tests, or electrocardiogram. She was recommended to undergo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the hypothalamic/pituitary area to exclude mass lesions. However, she refused the test, which was not done. Because her galactorrhea developed after initiations of her medication with escitalopram, we stopped her medication. After cessation of the medication, the discharge abated and breast pain was relieved. Her serum prolactin level decreased to 2.38 ng/mL five days after discontinuing escitalopram.
A 34-year-old female patient was admitted to our clinic with complaints of anhedonia, decreased appetite, loss of sexual desire, irritability and passive suicidal thoughts. These complaints had lasted about two months. The patient was considered to have major depressive disorder, so we initiated venlafaxine, 75 mg/day. Six months after this initiation, we increased the dose of venlafaxine to 150 mg, because the patient was not admitted to the clinic regularly.\nThree months later (the ninth month of treatment), we increased the venlafaxine dose to 225 mg/day. The patient started to experience galactorrhea while she was taking 150 mg/day, but she did not inform us about this side effect during our examination, so we increased the dose of venlafaxine. Ten days after taking venlafaxine at a dose of 225 mg/day, the patient was admitted to our clinic again for galactorrhea that was so severe she could not endure it anymore. Brain magnetic resonance imaging was performed for her pituitary tumor, but the result was normal. We checked her hormone levels: FSH, LH, T3, T4 and TSH were within the normal range; however, her prolactin level was 156 ng/ml. We considered the galactorrhea and the increased prolactin levels were a result of venlafaxine the patient had been taking. Consequently, we decreased the venlafaxine dose to 150 mg/day.\nOne month later, although her prolactin level had decreased to 9 ng/ml, the galactorrhea persisted. So we decreased the venlafaxine dose to 75 mg/day. At the patient’s next visit, she stated that while she was taking 75 mg/day, the galactorrhea symptoms had been significantly relieved, but she felt worse, so she started to take 150 mg/day again, which once more caused a severe case of galactorrhea. We decreased the dose of venlafaxine to 75 mg/day; afterwards, we switched the patient to escitalopram 10 mg/day, and lorazepam 2 mg/day. One month later, we increased the escitalopram dose to 20 mg/day, and over the course of the following four weeks, we tapered the lorazepam dose. With a treatment of escitalopram 20 mg/day, the patient has reported that she is feeling very well; she was experiencing only minimal galactorrhea, but she chose to continue with escitalopram.