New study finds that antidepressants are not an effective treatment for anxiety

A new study published in PLOS ONE suggests that antidepressants provide little benefit in the treatment of anxiety.

Some studies have suggested that antidepressants such as paroxetine (Paxil) do not help the majority of depressed people get better by very much. However, these drugs are also widely prescribed for the treatment of anxiety. Michael Sugarman, from the Wayne State University Department of Psychology, and his colleagues studied how much paroxetine benefited patients diagnosed with anxiety.

Sugarman and colleagues used a technique called "meta-analysis", where they put together data on clinical benefit from all the trials conducted by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline to test their antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) in the treatment of anxiety. Paxil is an antidepressant in the class of medications known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a class which also includes drugs such as Prozac, Celexa, and Zoloft. Previous studies have found that one SSRI is as effective as another.

By including data from unpublished as well as published trials, the researchers set out to avoid bias that might come from non-publication of disappointing findings. They found that a third of the paroxetine anxiety trials had not been published, and these showed significantly worse results than the published trials. When the data from all of these trials had been put together, the improvement in anxiety amongst patients receiving the trial drug, as compared to those receiving placebo (dummy tablets), was small and not likely to be clinically important. The benefit was particularly small in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder. It was somewhat better in the treatment of panic disorder, but even here the effect was small.

Quotation from Sugarman. "This study indicates that antidepressants are unlikely to provide clinically meaningful benefits in the treatment of anxiety. Although anxious patients get better when they take antidepressants, they also get better when they take a placebo, and the difference in improvement is not very great. People who improve while taking antidepressants may do so for reasons other than the chemicals in the drugs. Given that antidepressants carry a number of health risks and side effects, it is difficult to recommend their usage in clinical settings."

For a link to the full article, visit http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0106337.