jodawi: (Default)
Apophenia ([personal profile] jodawi) wrote2003-02-21 03:10 pm

Patients Benefit from Longer Use of Antidepressants

Brought to you by the fact that many peeps on my friends list seemed to stop taking their pills around Jan 1 for some reason
Fri Feb 21,12:36 AM ET - By Patricia Reaney

LONDON (Reuters) - Long-term use of antidepressants can prevent depressed patients suffering a relapse, a team of international researchers said on Friday.

Depression will affect about 10 percent of women and five percent of men sometime during their lives. Patients are normally treated with drugs for about four to six months to relieve the symptoms of the illness.

But Guy Goodwin, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford University in England, other researchers in Britain, Japan and the United States have found that extending treatment with all types of antidepressants for a year or more will help.

"The current use of antidepressants is quite short-term," he said in an interview.

"If you continue treatment for one, two or even three years you continue to have benefits. They don't wear off and for people at risk of recurrent illnesses it means they can probably afford to go on taking them for those periods of time and possibly longer," he added.

The findings reported in The Lancet medical journal are based on a review of data from 31 trials involving 4,400 patients suffering from depression.

All the patients had completed the standard treatment with antidepressants and were randomly selected to either continue the drugs or to receive a placebo.

Goodwin and his colleagues found that patients in the placebo group had double the rate of relapse compared to those on treatment.

"Few other interventions in psychiatry are supported with such robust findings," said Goodwin, adding that many patients have a risk of recurrence after completing treatment.

Depression affects nearly 19 million Americans, and millions more people worldwide, in any given year. Although the illness can be treated, most people do not seek remedies, which range from psychotherapy to antidepressants and the herbal therapy St. John's wort.

Antidepressants relieve symptoms such as lack of concentration, sadness and loss of pleasure and interest in life although some drugs can cause queasiness and a delay in sexual response.

"We think they (the drugs) allow people to recover. We think they work at quite a cognitive level. They change the biases that exist in the brain to see the bad in things versus the good," Goodwin added.

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