April 29, 2014
USA Today (4/29, Painter) reports that for years, “the Food and Drug Administration has…required antidepressants to carry warnings that they may increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adults under age 25.” Now, a study published online April 28 in JAMA Internal Medicine “finds the risk for deliberate self harm doubles when depressed young people start treatment with higher-than-usual doses.” Researchers arrived at this conclusion after examining “health records of 162,625 privately insured people ages 10 to 64 treated for depression with three popular antidepressants…Celexa [citalopram], Prozac [fluoxetine] and Zoloft [sertraline].”
The NPR (4/29, Shute) “Shots” blog reports that the self-harm effect was not seen in “people 25 and older.”
MedPage Today (4/29, Gever) reports on some shortcomings in the study, such as not including “physicians’ notes on why they prescribed high (or low) doses, depression severity at [selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors initiation, and] suicidality at SSRI initiation.” An accompanying commentary (4/29) observed that “the physicians who prescribed high SSRI doses may have had reasons – such as a belief that a high dose could help ward off incipient self-harm – that weren’t captured in the indirect measures available from the claims data.” Also covering the study are Forbes (4/29, Kroll), HealthDay (4/29, Goodman) and Medscape (4/29, Harrison).
Article courtesy American Medical Association
Speak Your Mind