On your meds

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I think that everyone has had the challenging pleasure of knowing at least one person who was bi-polar or suffered from schizophrenia. When they are up, they are incandescent -- wonderful fun people to be around but when they are down, they are an energy sink dragging everyone they come into contact with into their black hole of despair. There are meds around for this -- some of the modern ones are "too effective" in that people do not like taking them as although it does level out their swings, it also seriously dulls their up-time, the time when they are on top of the world and they are willing to suffer all the other times for the taste of the top. The older medications are not as strong or "targeted" but, they seem to have a much better overall effect, much to the chagrin of a few companies. From the Washington Post:
In Antipsychotics, Newer Isn't Better
Drug Find Shocks Researchers

Schizophrenia patients do as well, or perhaps even better, on older psychiatric drugs compared with newer and far costlier medications, according to a study published yesterday that overturns conventional wisdom about antipsychotic drugs, which cost the United States $10 billion a year.

The results are causing consternation. The researchers who conducted the trial were so certain they would find exactly the opposite that they went back to make sure the research data had not been recorded backward.

The study, funded by the British government, is the first to compare treatment results from a broad range of older antipsychotic drugs against results from newer ones. The study was requested by Britain's National Health Service to determine whether the newer drugs -- which can cost 10 times as much as the older ones -- are worth the difference in price.

There has been a surge in prescriptions of the newer antipsychotic drugs in recent years, including among children.

The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, is likely to add to a growing debate about prescribing patterns of antipsychotic drugs. A U.S. government study last year found that one of the older drugs did as well as newer ones, but at the time, many American psychiatrists warned against concluding that all the older drugs were as good.

Yesterday, in an editorial accompanying the British study, the lead researcher in the U.S. trial asked how an entire medical field could have been misled into thinking that the expensive drugs, such as Zyprexa, Risperdal and Seroquel, were much better.

"The claims of superiority for the [newer drugs] were greatly exaggerated," wrote Columbia University psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman. "This may have been encouraged by an overly expectant community of clinicians and patients eager to believe in the power of new medications. At the same time, the aggressive marketing of these drugs may have contributed to this enhanced perception of their effectiveness in the absence of empirical information."
Whoops! Sometimes newer is not necessarily better.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on October 2, 2006 10:29 PM.

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