corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12473

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

McIlroy A.
Antidepressants less effective than doctors been led to believe: study
The Canadian Press 2008 Jan 18
http://www.amherstdaily.com/index.cfm?sid=99147&sc=58


Full text:

Antidepressants are far less effective than doctors have been led to believe, a new study has found.

That’s because 88 per cent of clinical trials that showed the drugs didn’t work either weren’t published in medical journals or were presented as positive findings, says the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

It provides the first hard data on a practice known as selective reporting, in which the good news about a drug is made public but the bad news isn’t.

Ethicists say it gives doctors and patients too rosy a picture. Clinicians rely on the medical literature to learn about new drugs and to help them assess whether it is worth prescribing a medication, given the risk of side effects.

The researchers examined the studies that drug companies submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the United States when they were seeking regulatory approval for 12 antidepressants.

The drugs were all approved between 1981 and 2004, and are now widely prescribed.

Canada has its own drug approvals process, which relies on essentially the same information drug companies give the FDA.

With the antidepressants, doctors and patients didn’t get the same full picture as the regulatory agencies.

All but one of the 38 positive studies given to the FDA were published, but most of the negative ones didn’t make it into print.

A doctor reading the medical journals would think that individual antidepressants were between 11- and 69-per-cent more effective than they really are, says Erick Turner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University and lead author on the paper.

It is not that antidepressants don’t work, Turner says.

His team’s analysis showed that they all work better than sugar pills, but that their effectiveness has been exaggerated.

This might tip the scales against prescribing the drugs in borderline cases, he says.

The study says it is unclear whether the drug companies didn’t submit the negative studies to the medical journals, or whether they did and the papers were rejected.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








...to influence multinational corporations effectively, the efforts of governments will have to be complemented by others, notably the many voluntary organisations that have shown they can effectively represent society’s public-health interests…
A small group known as Healthy Skepticism; formerly the Medical Lobby for Appropriate Marketing) has consistently and insistently drawn the attention of producers to promotional malpractice, calling for (and often securing) correction. These organisations [Healthy Skepticism, Médecins Sans Frontières and Health Action International] are small, but they are capable; they bear malice towards no one, and they are inscrutably honest. If industry is indeed persuaded to face up to its social responsibilities in the coming years it may well be because of these associations and others like them.
- Dukes MN. Accountability of the pharmaceutical industry. Lancet. 2002 Nov 23; 360(9346)1682-4.