Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Ain't this depressing

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.

When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs...

..They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.

The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.
Nevertheless, Eli Lilly thanks you for your support.

// posted by montag @ 7:24 AM
Comments:
The lead paragraph of this article is deceptively incomplete. It states that "Prozac..does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class..." The first sentence from the "Discussion" section of that actual article is quoted to support this assertion. The second sentence of the this section in the original article is never mentioned though. That sentence indicates that "We also find that efficacy reaches clinical significance only in trials involving the most extremely depressed patients..."

You could say that they don't work for mildly or moderately depressed patients but they do work for the severely depressed.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 5:19 PM
 

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