Placebos and Antidepressants
Want to know where we get the 'up to 70% success' claim in our packaging?
"The placebo response, noted as an early or nonpersistent improvement in response to an inactive agent, represents one of the most significant challenges in central nervous system (CNS) drug development. Despite a wealth of documentation, there is no commonly accepted definition of this phenomenon. However, it is agreed that there has been a significant increase in the placebo response in the last 20 years, particularly in clinical trials with antidepressant medications for major depressive disorder (MDD).
Estimates as high as 70% have been reported for CNS clinical trials. (our italics) Such large placebo rates have a significant impact on the cost and speed of drug development.
Since fewer than half of the depressed patients who receive active medications in psychiatric trials show clinically significant improvement, some critics claim that antidepressants are no better than placebo treatment, and their illusory superiority depends on poorly designed studies and biased clinical evaluations. In a set of six identically designed, three-arm, parallel controlled trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for an antidepressant drug, Leber reported that antidepressants could not be distinguished from placebo in five of the six studies."
Ref. Richard Entsuah, Phil Vinall: Potential Predictors of Placebo Response: Lessons From a Large Database, Drug Information Journal. Ambler: 2007. Vol. 41, Iss. 3; pg. 315, 16 pgs
Prozac 'does not work' An
Prozac 'does not work'
An article by Sarah Bosley, The Guardian Weekly 29.02.08
Prozac, the antidepressant taken by 40 million worldwide does not work and nor do similar drugs, according to a major review that examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients of those taking the drugs with those given a placebo.
It appears that patients had improved, but those on a placebo had improved as much as those on the drugs. The only exceptions were the most severely depressed patients, said the authors Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada.
The review breaks new ground because they obtained for the first time a full set of trial data for four antidepressants. They requested it under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licences medicines in the US.