Generation shows no difference with placebos.
How are known for their French bulimia "pink pills of happiness" are they going to react to this news? Two scientists, Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull (United Kingdom), and Blair Johnston of the University of Connecticut (USA), just to review all clinical trials of six new antidepressants generation's most prescribed: Prozac, Effexor, Deroxat, Zoloft and Seropram (Serzone has been withdrawn from the market in 2003). Their verdict is final. These drugs, which all belong to the category known inhibitors of serotonin reuptake, is not more effective than placebo! In other words, a medicine containing no active ingredient…
How the medical profession has been able to prescribe these drugs to tens of millions of people worldwide over the past twenty years (in 2000, 9.7% of French in the general scheme, or about 5.5 million people , had been prescribed at least once an antidepressant)? The answer has already been given last month in the New England Journal of Medicine: pharmaceutical companies that do not publish studies giving positive results. As a result, the effectiveness of the drugs they promote with the help of psychiatrists opinion leaders is widely exaggerated…
Today, Kirsch and his team pound the nail in an original way. Thanks to a legal unique in the world, the Freedom of Information Act, which gives access to any American citizen to administrative documents public, they were able to get the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the files of 47 clinical trials conducted by the laboratories to obtain permission to market their antidepressants. And including unpublished trials, which are very often negative.
The researchers discovered that four studies concerning Zoloft from Pfizer (among all existing tests) did not show significant therapeutic effect. Same for the Seropram, laboratory Lundbeck, with a negative test.
According to the authors, these "lies by omission" represent between 23 and 38% of patients included in all clinical trials evaluating antidepressants. What makes much… The complete analysis of all data carried out by these researchers, including those unpublished, has the effect of "diluting" the performance of drugs. So, once these negative studies taken into account, the effectiveness of antidepressants appears hardly different from placebo.
"Psychiatrists untrained"
The severity of depression was estimated based on the responses to 21 questions posed to the patient, according to a rating scale developed in 1960 by the British psychiatrist Max Hamilton. An analysis of clinical trials published and unpublished, submitted to the FDA, showed a difference of only 1.8 percentage points on the scale between the placebo and antidepressant. But the official recommendations of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) British call for a gap of at least 3 points to validate the effectiveness of an antidepressant.
More embarrassing: unpublished studies were hidden in Nice, when its experts made recommendations on the treatment of depression.
Tim Kendall, deputy director of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Research Unit, said in the Times that the results of this study are "fantastically important" and that it was "dangerous to pharmaceutical companies not to publish all their data." For Professor Jean-Michel Ougourlian, a psychiatrist at the American Hospital in Neuilly, "the drama of the new antidepressants, they are ill prescribed. People have called for a love, a period of unemployment, a strong blues… It is ignorance of the doctors: a melancholy serious does not respond to these drugs. The problem is upstream: psychiatrists are not trained and diagnoses are not insured. "
How the medical profession has been able to prescribe these drugs to tens of millions of people worldwide over the past twenty years (in 2000, 9.7% of French in the general scheme, or about 5.5 million people , had been prescribed at least once an antidepressant)? The answer has already been given last month in the New England Journal of Medicine: pharmaceutical companies that do not publish studies giving positive results. As a result, the effectiveness of the drugs they promote with the help of psychiatrists opinion leaders is widely exaggerated…
Today, Kirsch and his team pound the nail in an original way. Thanks to a legal unique in the world, the Freedom of Information Act, which gives access to any American citizen to administrative documents public, they were able to get the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the files of 47 clinical trials conducted by the laboratories to obtain permission to market their antidepressants. And including unpublished trials, which are very often negative.
The researchers discovered that four studies concerning Zoloft from Pfizer (among all existing tests) did not show significant therapeutic effect. Same for the Seropram, laboratory Lundbeck, with a negative test.
According to the authors, these "lies by omission" represent between 23 and 38% of patients included in all clinical trials evaluating antidepressants. What makes much… The complete analysis of all data carried out by these researchers, including those unpublished, has the effect of "diluting" the performance of drugs. So, once these negative studies taken into account, the effectiveness of antidepressants appears hardly different from placebo.
"Psychiatrists untrained"
The severity of depression was estimated based on the responses to 21 questions posed to the patient, according to a rating scale developed in 1960 by the British psychiatrist Max Hamilton. An analysis of clinical trials published and unpublished, submitted to the FDA, showed a difference of only 1.8 percentage points on the scale between the placebo and antidepressant. But the official recommendations of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) British call for a gap of at least 3 points to validate the effectiveness of an antidepressant.
More embarrassing: unpublished studies were hidden in Nice, when its experts made recommendations on the treatment of depression.
Tim Kendall, deputy director of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Research Unit, said in the Times that the results of this study are "fantastically important" and that it was "dangerous to pharmaceutical companies not to publish all their data." For Professor Jean-Michel Ougourlian, a psychiatrist at the American Hospital in Neuilly, "the drama of the new antidepressants, they are ill prescribed. People have called for a love, a period of unemployment, a strong blues… It is ignorance of the doctors: a melancholy serious does not respond to these drugs. The problem is upstream: psychiatrists are not trained and diagnoses are not insured. "
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10:33 AM
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