TO READ: Antidepressants Don't Help Most Patients?
Could we have been misled by the "non-publishing" of studies that show poor results for common antidepressants? New research combining both the "good" and "bad" results of many studies on antidepressants' effectiveness suggests so. The new data says the medicines are no more beneficial to most patients than a placebo pill, and only help certain severely depressed people.


Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull, in the United Kingdom, along with colleagues from the US and Canada, studied Prozac, Effexor, Serzone and Paxil. They used a statistical "meta-analysis" to combined the data from all the trials submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration. Data from some of these studies had never been published, and some included what might be considered disappointing results.


The scientists found that patients with moderate depression responded almost equally well to the drugs versus a placebo. In addition, "Drug–placebo differences . . . are relatively small even for severely depressed patients." The severely depressed people seemed to respond to medicine somewhat better, but this was attributable to the fact that they responded worse to the placebo.

For additional info: see PLos Medicine (a peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science) for February 26, 2008.