Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6192

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Publication type: news

Farmer R.
Drug industry deluded on anti-psychotics
2006 Oct 5

Full text:

Drug industry deluded on anti-psychotics
Richard Farmer writes:

Health Minister Tony Abbott has received some welcome support this week
for
the sceptical approach to putting new drugs on the Pharmaceutical
Benefits
Scheme list which is necessary to limit the escalating cost to the
budget.

A study funded by the British government and published in the Archives
of
General Psychiatry has found that new treatments for schizophrenia
perform
no better, and perhaps worse, than older drugs although they cost up to
10
times more.

The findings are bound to cause a problem or two for the drugs industry
with

Columbia University psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman commenting in the
Archives that the claims of superiority for the newer drugs were
greatly
exaggerated.

“This may have been encouraged by an overly expectant community of
clinicians and patients eager to believe in the power of new
medications,”
he wrote. “At the same time, the aggressive marketing of these drugs
may
have contributed to this enhanced perception of their effectiveness in
the
absence of empirical information.”

Mr Lieberman conducted a U.S. government study last year that found
that one

of the older drugs did as well as newer ones. The Washington Post
reported
that, at the time, many American psychiatrists warned against
concluding
that all the older drugs were as good.

Now it seems there can be no doubt. The perception that more expensive
second generation anti-psychotics are more effective, with fewer
adverse
effects, and preferable to patients than the drugs they replaced is
wrong.

Mr Abbott would do well to start looking again at the question of the
advertising and promotional activities of the drug industry.