Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13091
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
Goldstein J.
Do Antidepressants Work Better Than Placebos?
The Wall Street Journal 2008 Feb 26
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/02/26/do-antidepressants-work-better-than-placebos/
Full text:
Antidepressants don’t work much better than placebos for many depressed patients, an analysis in the journal PLoS Medicine found. But for many patients, placebos work pretty well indeed.
Patients who received placebos and those who got real drugs both showed an “extremely large magnitude [of improvement] according to conventional standards,” the authors wrote. While those who received drugs did show a bit more improvement, the overall difference between the drug group and the placebo group was less than the minimum generally considered clinically significant, the authors found.
One group that did show clearly meaningful benefit from drugs compared with placebos: extremely depressed patients. Those patients, the authors concluded, don’t tend to get much benefit from placebos.
The authors, based at research centers in the U.K. and the U.S., analyzed data from clinical trials of the six most widely prescribed antidepressants approved between 1987 and 1999, an era when popular drugs such as Prozac from Eli Lilly, Paxil from GlaxoSmithKline and Zoloft from Pfizer hit the market. The researchers used not only published studies but also unpublished data submitted to FDA.
Glaxo, which now sells a reformulated version of its former blockbuster as Paxil CR, said the authors of the study had “failed to acknowledge” the very positive benefits of SSRIs and their conclusions were “at odds with the very positive benefits seen in actual clinical practice,” the U.K. newspaper The Independent reported. “This one study should not be used to cause unnecessary alarm for patients,” a company spokesman told the paper.
