Drug & Device News

A paper published in February in the journal Plos Medicine asserts that most patients receive no measurable benefit from taking prescribed antidepressant medications. The paper ' Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the FDA ' was authored by professors at England's University of Hull, who analized data from several antidepressants' clinical trails, including those that went unpublished. They found that only a small number of severely depressed patients were helped by antidepressants and that those with lesser degrees of depression (and even some who were extremely depressed) exhibited no clinically significant benefits with antidepressant use as compared to placebo use. The research team chalked up the drug companies' claims of widespread patient benefits with antidepressant use to reporting biases caused by multiple publication of test results and selective reporting of only favorable results.

In a University of Hull release, Professor Irving Kirsch of the university's psychology department, and the study's lead researcher, said, 'The difference in improvement between patients taking placebos and patients taking antidepressants is not very great. This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments. Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed to provide a benefit. This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported.' University of Hull release, 'Antidepressants are ineffective for most patients, study finds,' http://www.hull.ac.uk/news/feb08/antidepressants.html (last accessed 2/26/08).