Pharmalot is reporting today that a famous study on the relationship between the use of anti-depressants and suicide has been recalled by the authors. Go here for the details.
Eight years ago, the FDA decided to require Black Box warnings on labeling for anti-depressants for teenagers and children. Critics of that decision, have apparently used as support a 2010 paper which reviewed data on the toxicological detection of antidepressants in nearly 19,000 suicides in Sweden between 1992 and 2003 that were linked to registers of psychiatric hospitalization. As Pharmalot reports today, however, now the paper has been retracted by the authors due to “unintentional errors in the analysis of the data presented.”
I hope that this retraction of one paper in a slew of research disproving the connection between suicidality and antidepressants won't cause the public to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
ReplyDeleteIn essence, this one on its own isn't necessary. The newest research is by Robert Gibbons in Feb, disproving the connection vis-a-vis prozac.
[For full information, see the post "'The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated': As Is the Correlation of Antidepressants With Suicide" at http://wp.me/p22afJ-1sU.]
Gibbons also published a piece as early as 2007 showing how youth suicides declined with the prevalence of the new SSRIs--and then increased again after FDA warnings, and as early as 2004, before the second and third warnings, a paper in CNS drugs entitled "Antidepressant Treatment and Risk of Suicide Attempt by Adolescents with Major Depressive Disorder: A Propensity-Adjusted Retrospective Cohort Study" found that "Antidepressant medication use had no statistically significant effect on the likelihood of suicide attempt in a large cohort of adolescents across the US."
Sometimes things aren't what we believed them to be--despite an unfortunate retraction issue.