" ... A consortium of UK, US and Canadian researchers used Freedom of Information legislation to force the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give it all the clinical trials, published and unpublished, for a range of commonly used latest-generation antidepressants, the SSRIs. (The FDA holds all the trials, published and unpublished, on a particular drug. Drug companies have to supply the trials in order to get the drug licensed.)
The researchers analysed all the trials and published the results of their analyses in PLoS Medicine, a free, open-access non-profit science journal. The drugs they looked at were fluoxetine (Prozac), venlafaxine (Effexor), paroxetine (Aropax), and nefazodone (Serzone, which is no longer prescribed in Australia).
They found that for mild and moderate depression, the antidepressants were statistically no better than a placebo. They did produce a slight improvement over placebo but the improvement was so small it couldn't be considered significant, they concluded.
Only in people with severe depression was the improvement over placebo large enough to be able to say the drugs worked.
Implications
The fact that the drug companies suppressed the studies showing they didn't work, is another in a string of scandals besetting the pharmaceutical industry. (The last was the Cox-2 inhibitors scandal, in which the makers of arthritis drugs Vioxx and Celebrex were accused of deliberately withholding evidence that their drugs were linked to heart disease. They face massive lawsuits.) ... "
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