Thursday, February 12, 2004
Antidepressants and suicide
19-year-old college student who had shown no outward signs of depression killed herself over the weekend at an Eli Lilly & Company laboratory in Indianapolis where she had been participating in a company drug trial for an experimental antidepressant.
The student, Traci Johnson, was one of 25 healthy patients at an Eli Lilly clinic who were being given larger than therapeutic doses of duloxetine, which will be known as Cymbalta if it is introduced as an antidepressant. Four days before her death, Ms. Johnson was taken off Cymbalta and given a placebo.
While Eli Lilly asserted that it had properly screened Ms. Johnson before the study started to ensure that she was healthy and had no mental problems, her death is being used by critics of a popular class of antidepressants to bolster their case that the widely used drugs carry the risk of suicidal tendencies for a small number of people, particularly young people.
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Whether antidepressants cause some people to commit suicide was an issue that flared briefly in the early 1990's but had been largely dismissed by mainstream researchers until last summer. That is when GlaxoSmithKline warned that a series of studies had found that children and teenagers given Paxil were more likely to attempt or think about suicide than those given a placebo.
Wyeth soon followed with a warning suggesting that its antidepressant, Effexor, should not be given to children. British and American drug regulators set to work studying the problem. The British soon concluded that most antidepressants in this class should not be used in children and teenagers since they have not proved effective in that population and could be linked to suicide.
The F.D.A. continues to study the issue, said Susan Cruzan, an agency spokeswoman.
Story.
posted by chris at 10:43 AM
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