Thursday, December 23, 2004
Rethinking childhood depression Articlke in the
British Medical Journal - "Increasing numbers of children are being treated for depression. At the end of 2003, over 50 000 children were prescribed antidepressants, and over 170 000 prescriptions a year for antidepressants were issued to people under 18 years old in the United Kingdom. Recent evidence has suggested that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are largely ineffective and may be dangerous in this age group. Older antidepressants have already been shown to have no beneficial effect in people under 18.4 So how did we get into this mess? Undoubtedly part of the problem is with pharmaceutical industry tactics, designed to enable greater consumption of their products.3 However, the gateway diagnosis to prescribing antidepressants to under 18s is that of childhood depression. In this article I discuss the notion of childhood depression and suggest that the medicalisation of children's unhappiness is hindering our ability to respond effectively to this problem..."
Expert panel calls for raising the bar in treating schizophreniaChandler Chicco Agency press release at
EurekAlert - "A panel of experts says doctors treating patients with schizophrenia should be targeting symptoms beyond hallucinations and delusions, and focus in on the common, but often overlooked, symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as the inability to think clearly. Patients agree, ranking these symptoms as major concerns in a recent national survey. As a result, the expert panel, convened by MBL Communications, Inc., publishers of the trade journals
Primary Psychiatry and
CNS Spectrums, will be issuing a consensus statement about new treatment goals for schizophrenia."
Patient protection laws don't favor health providersWake Forest University Baptist Medical Center press release at
EurekAlert - "Despite critics who say patients' bills of rights laws are actually designed to protect health care providers, new research published in the current issue of the American Journal of Medicine found just the opposite. 'There is little evidence these laws have much impact on providers' economic concerns,' said Mark Hall, J.D., professor of law and public health at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Hall reviewed managed care patient protection laws in the 48 states that have enacted them and also surveyed state regulators about law content. Commonly known as patients' bills of rights, these laws are aimed at restraining the perceived excesses of managed care, including "gate-keeping," or denying insurance payment for medically necessary treatment and restricting patients' choice of physicians Critics of the laws, however, say they actually provide protection to providers. Hall's research was designed to assess the validity of these claims by evaluating the laws' impacts."
Fluoxetine Appears Effective In Less-Severe Depression Psychiatric News story - "While subjects' symptoms of minor depression improved in the 12-week study period, researchers say that full normalization of psychosocial function may require longer treatment. A 12-week regimen of fluoxetine appears to be successful in ameliorating depressive symptoms in patients who do not meet criteria for major depressive disorder. But improvement in psychosocial functioning with fluoxetine may take longer than 12 weeks in these patients, according to a study in the October
American Journal of Psychiatry."
Negative Clinical Trial Is Complex Creature Psychiatric News story - "The challenges of analyzing a 'negative' drug trial prompt researchers to think outside the box and consider more issues than "simple" drug efficacy and tolerability. On the surface this trial appeared to be just one more negative, or failed, drug trial funded by industry. However, it found itself published in a prestigious journal, illustrating the adage, 'the devil is in the details.' Those details, however, are anything but common, according to Steven Roose, M.D., a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a psychopharmacology researcher at the New York State Psychiatric Institute."
