no way New review of the withdrawal of antidepressants-Many people written by academia have a close relationship with pharmaceutical manufacturers. There is a risk of underestimating potential damage to long -term antidepressants by focusing on short -term and industrial support research.
If you stop antidepressant antidepressants (especially after long -term use), it can cause severe and sometimes withdrawal symptoms, and is recognized as a public health problem by the British government.
One of the main reasons why this problem took decades after the launch of Hyundai Patriots on the market was that the medical guidelines produced by the ENGLAND ‘s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence have declared the withdrawal effect of “simple and light” for many years.
This explanation is based on a study operated by pharmaceutical companies that have taken drugs for 8-12 weeks. As a result, when the patient was later seen as a serious and long lasting symptom, many doctors did not take seriously because this experience contradicted the expectation of the guidelines.
Our recent research helps to explain this inconsistency. We have clearly discovered the possibility of someone taking antidepressants and the likelihood of withdrawal and how serious these symptoms are.
We found that people who used antidepressants for more than two years were 10 times more withdrawal effects, and the effects were 5 times more likely, and it was 18 times more likely to last compared to those who took the drug within 6 months.
For patients with antidepressants for less than six months, the withdrawal symptoms were mostly minor and short. 3/4 reported no or light symptoms, most of which were less than four weeks.
Only one of these patients could not stop when I wanted. However, for long -term users (more than two years), two -thirds have reported a serious withdrawal effect of 1/4 and reported a medium or serious withdrawal effect. Nearly one -third of the long -term users reported the symptoms that lasted more than three months. One quarter of this patient could not stop antidepressants.
According to the BBC survey, about 2 million people are taking more than five years on the UK antidepressant. And in the United States, at least 25 million people have taken antidepressants for more than five years. What happens to people in 8-12 weeks is that it’s far from what happens when millions of people stop.
Studying what happens to people after only 8-12 weeks in antidepressants is like testing car safety by colliding with a vehicle on a wall of 5 km/h. Ignores the fact that the actual driver is coming out of 60 km/h.
Do you repeat history?
In this background, the review was just posted. Jamagi psychiatric. Some of the senior authors declare their payments from pharmaceutical companies. If history seems to be repeated, this review is based on a short -term test that is similar to what is used to form an initial treatment guideline (a short -term trial that supports funds in the pharmaceutical industry). The authors concluded that antidepressants do not cause a significant withdrawal effect.
Their main analysis is based on 11 tests that compare the withdrawal of those who have stopped antidepressants. Six of these tests had antidepressants for eight weeks, four for 12 weeks, and one person in 26 weeks.
They have reported slightly more withdrawal symptoms to those who have stopped antidepressants, saying that they are not “clinically significant” withdrawal syndrome. It also suggests that symptoms can be explained by “Nosebo Effect”. Here, people can get worse due to negative expectations.
From our point of view, the results will greatly underestimate the risk of withdrawal to the drug over the years. This review has nothing to do with the period of use of antidepressants and withdrawal symptoms, but long -term research was too small to test this association correctly.
This review will probably underestimate the short -term withdrawal effect by assuming that from our point of view, when people have stopped the placebo, they canceled the withdrawal effect of the antidepressant if they continue to experience the withdrawal. But this is not a valid assumption.
We know that the withdrawal of antidepressants overlaps with side effects and everyday symptoms, but it does not mean that this is the same. This is because people stop the placebo generally causes symptoms such as dizziness and headaches. But it was shown to others Recent reviewAfter stopping the placebo, the symptoms tend to be lighter than experienced when the antidepressant is stopped, which can be strong enough to require emergency treatment.
Therefore, if you stop the placebo or continue the antidepressant withdrawal from the antidepressant withdrawal, you can underestimate the actual forbidden degree of withdrawal.
This review does not include studies of various well -designed pharmaceutical companies that may have high withdrawal symptoms. For example, American study More than 60% of those who stopped antidepressants (11 months later) experienced withdrawal symptoms.
The authors suggest that after stopping the antidepressant, depression is probably the rate of depression from those who have stopped the placebo. However, this conclusion is based on limited and unreliable data (ie, depends on the research participants to report such events without systematically evaluating them in five studies).
We hope that critical reporting of a kind of short -term study that first not recognizes the withdrawal effect will not interfere with the slow efforts to help millions of people who can increase the acception and seriously affect the health system.
Some withdrawal effects are serious enough to require emergency treatment.
Mark Horowitz is a visiting clinical researcher at UCL’s PSYCHIATRY, and Joanna Moncrief is a critical and social psychiatrist professor of UCL.
This article was originally published by dialogue and was re -published according to the Creative Commons license. Read Original article
