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Monday, September 13, 2004The Columbia experts were asked by the FDA to determine whether instances of self-harm that occurred during clinical trials were truly suicide attempts. No child had actually killed himself during the trials — a detail often overlooked in the media coverage — but there were incidents ranging in seriousness from a hanging attempt to lightly scratching one's arm to a girl who slapped herself in the face. When the Columbia experts parsed these events into various categories they found relatively little cause for alarm. Within the 15 clinical trials of pediatric depression they examined, youngsters on SSRIs were no more likely to experience an "emergence of suicidality" than those on placebo, nor was there any discrepancy between the two groups with respect to the "worsening of suicidality." And it turns out there's at least some evidence that SSRI's may reduce suicide in cases of true depression: ....Along these lines, a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year looked at the numbers of anti-depressant prescriptions written for youths according to zip codes across the country and compared them with census data on youth suicide. The greater the increase in the prescriptions in particular geographic areas, the sharper the reduction in the teen-suicide rates in those locations over the last decade. Though an intriguing finding, the study did not control for potential risk factors such as substance use and so cannot be said to constitute definitive proof. Bottom line? I wouldn't be afraid of the newer anti-depressants if your child is truly depressed. posted by Sydney on 9/13/2004 08:18:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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