The antidepressant tale: figures signifying nothing?

Suicidality and other severe psychiatric events with duloxetine: Re-analysis of safety data from a placebo-controlled trial for juvenile fibromyalgia

BACKGROUND

In antidepressant trials for pediatric patients with depression or anxiety disorders, the risk of suicidal events and other severe psychiatric adverse events such as aggression and agitation is increased with antidepressants relative to placebo.

OBJECTIVE

To examine whether largely mentally healthy adolescents treated for a non-psychiatric condition are also at increased risk of suicidality and other severe psychiatric disorders.

METHODS

This is a re-analysis of a placebo-controlled duloxetine trial for juvenile fibromyalgia based on the main journal article and additional data published in the online supplementary material and on ClinicalTrials.gov. Both serious adverse events related to psychiatric disorders and adverse events leading to treatment discontinuation were defined as severe treatment-emergent psychiatric adverse events.

RESULTS

We found that a significant portion of adolescents had treatment-emergent suicidal ideation and behaviour as well as other severe psychiatric adverse events with duloxetine, but no such events were recorded on placebo. The incidence of severe treatment-emergent psychiatric adverse events was statistically significantly higher with duloxetine as compared to placebo.

CONCLUSIONS

Antidepressants may put adolescents at risk of suicidality and other severe psychiatric disorders even when the treatment indication is not depression or anxiety.

Healthy publics: enabling cultures and environments for health

Despite extraordinary advances in biomedicine and associated gains in human health and well-being, a growing number of health and well-being related challenges have remained or emerged in recent years. These challenges are often 'more than biomedical' in complexion, being social, cultural and environmental in terms of their key drivers and determinants, and underline the necessity of a concerted policy focus on generating healthy societies. Despite the apparent agreement on this diagnosis, the means to produce change are seldom clear, even when the turn to health and well-being requires sizable shifts in our understandings of public health and research practices. This paper sets out a platform from which research approaches, methods and translational pathways for enabling health and well-being can be built. The term 'healthy publics' allows us to shift the focus of public health away from 'the public' or individuals as targets for intervention, and away from the view that culture acts as a barrier to efficient biomedical intervention, towards a greater recognition of the public struggles that are involved in raising health issues, questioning what counts as healthy and unhealthy and assembling the evidence and experience to change practices and outcomes. Creating the conditions for health and well-being, we argue, requires an engaged research process in which public experiments in building and repairing social and material relations are staged and sustained even if, and especially when, the fates of those publics remain fragile and buffeted by competing and often more powerful public formations.

The relevance of cytochrome P450 polymorphism in forensic medicine and akathisia-related violence and suicide

Adverse drug reactions and interactions are among the major causes of death in the United States. Antidepressants have been reported as causing suicide and homicide and share the class attribute of frequently producing akathisia, a state of severe restlessness associated with thoughts of death and violence. Medical examiners can now identify some pharmacogenetic interactions that cause drugs, deemed safe for most, to be lethal to others. Such deaths do not yet include medication-induced, akathisia-related suicides and homicides. An extrapyramidal side effect, akathisia is a manifestation of drug toxicity whose causes lie, inter alia, in drugs, doses, and co-prescribed medications that inhibit and compete for metabolizing enzymes, which may themselves be defective. In this paper, we report our investigation into adverse drug reactions/interactions in three persons who committed homicide, two also intending suicide, while on antidepressants prescribed for stressful life events. Their histories of medication use, adverse reactions and reasons for changes in medications are presented. DNA samples were screened for variants in the cytochrome P450 gene family; that produce drug metabolizing enzymes. All three cases exhibit genotype-based diminished metabolic capability that, in combination with their enzyme inhibiting/competing medications, decreased metabolism further and are the likely cause of these catastrophic events.

Antidepressant-induced suicidality: how translational epidemiology incorporating pharmacogenetics into controlled trials can improve clinical care

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been a staple of the drug development process for several decades. Here, we review the origins of RCTs and their adoption within drug development, highlighting shortcomings that tend to be ignored and possible solutions offered from personalized medicine. While RCTs play an important role in development of therapeutics, we underscore how if used indiscriminately, their adverse effects may outweigh the benefits. As an example, we focus on the development of antidepressants and how a severe adverse drug response – suicidal ideation – can be overlooked. We conclude with a discussion of how pharmacogenetics may address some of the deficiencies of RCTs, bringing the focus of drug response back to the individual patient rather than the population, using as an example the discovery of genetic markers associated with antidepressant-induced suicidal ideation.

Profitable failure: antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments

Drawing on an analysis of Irving Kirsch and colleagues' controversial 2008 article in "PLoS [Public Library of Science] Magazine" on the efficacy of SSRI antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, I examine flaws within the methodologies of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have made it difficult for regulators, clinicians and patients to determine the therapeutic value of this class of drug. I then argue, drawing analogies to work by Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Power, that it is the very limitations of RCTs -- their inadequacies in producing reliable evidence of clinical effects -- that help to strengthen assumptions of their superiority as methodological tools. Finally, I suggest that the case of RCTs helps to explore the question of why failure is often useful in consolidating the authority of those who have presided over that failure, and why systems widely recognized to be ineffective tend to assume greater authority at the very moment when people speak of their malfunction.

Trussed in evidence? Ambiguities at the interface between clinical evidence and clinical practice

This article considers the dominance that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of psychotropic agents currently have in relation to the practice of psychiatry in mental health and primary care settings. In contemporary psychiatry, data of marginal significance based on rating scale measures are privileged as evidence that treatments are effective, while judgments of drug effects based on clinical practice are downgraded. The dominance of RCTs has also led to an increasing promotion of rating scales in clinical practice, described here as ;rating scale mongering.' The logical consequence of current interpretations of RCT data is that clinicians should adhere to guidelines which are based on a systematic assembly of such data, but the selective publication of trial data and ghostwriting of publications, lays the basis for guideline capture, and a corresponding capture of evidence-based clinical practice by pharmaceutical companies.