A U.S. report said warnings about a possible link between antidepressants and teen suicide may have led to more suicides.

Robert Gibbons, professor of biostatistics and psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and colleagues examined U.S. and Dutch data on prescription rates for antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil from 2003 to 2005 in children and adolescents, as well as suicide rates to determine whether the warnings led to increases in suicide rates as a result of untreated depression, an abstract of the report said.

The report, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, found that antidepressant prescriptions for youths decreased by approximately 22 percent in both the United States and the Netherlands after U.S. and European regulatory agencies issued the warnings.

In the Netherlands, the youth suicide rate increased by 49 percent between 2003 and 2005. In the United States, youth suicide rates increased by 14 percent between 2003 and 2004 -- the largest year-to-year change in suicide rates in this population since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began systematically collecting suicide data in 1979. // Copyright 2007 by United Press International


Publication date: 07 September 2007   

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