Prozac Does Not Work, Says Scientists

First, a cross post from Kevin Drum over at Washington Monthly:

A new meta-study conducted by Irving Kirsch of Hull University and five American and Canadian researchers has concluded that Prozac and other antidepressants in the SSRI family are essentially worthless. Compared to a placebo, they improved patients' scores on the most widely used depression scale by only 1.8 points:

The review breaks new ground because Kirsch and his colleagues have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants.

They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.

The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

Here is a link to the article from the UK. I'm not surprised that the US papers aren't all over this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/26/mentalhealth.medicalresearch

Check out our links to Dan Carlat's blog and his article in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back...you'll find them under "drug industry critiques".