Study Says Antidepressants Only Benefit The Severely Depressed
Recent reports have indicated that a new study by researchers in the UK suggests that antidepressants only benefit the very severely depressed.
The same study stated that these drugs are no more effective than a placebo for everyone else.
It is noteworthy of mention that this meta-analytical study (ie one that systematically pools the results of other studies) is the work of Dr Irving Kirsch, from the University of Hull, and his colleagues, and is published today, 26th February, in the open access journal PLoS Medicine.
It should be noted that antidepressants are prescribed for the treatment of clinical depression, and the most widely used are the "new generation" drugs, the SSRIs such as fluoxetine (Prozac) and venlafaxine (Effexor).
Furthermore, former meta-analytical studies of antidepressants have already suggested they have only modest benefits over placebos, in addition the authors pointed out that when data from unpublished trials are included, the benefits are so small they fall below the criteria for clinical significance.
The results showed that:
- Drug-placebo differences got bigger as initial severity went up.
- This difference was hardly noticeable at moderate levels of initial depression, went up to a relatively small difference for patients with severe depression, and reached a level that would be classed as clinically significant only in those patients at the extreme end of the very depressed scale.
- The improvement seemed to result from the most severely depressed patients not responding as well to placebo compared to their less depressed counterparts, than because they responded better to the active drug.
"Drug-placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients."
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posted by Foras Aje @ 5:03 PM
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