A recent study published in the journal Plos One has shown that antidepressants may not be as effective as people think. In fact, they may not work at all.
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The recent study
The study was led by Omar Almohammed of King Saud University, Saudi Arabia. The study analysed 17.5 million US adults who were diagnosed with depression over 10 years. Around half of the adults were on medication, while the other half were not.
According to the study, there was a slight improvement in mental health for both groups, whether they were on antidepressants or not.
The NHS has already started to avoid prescribing antidepressants to depressed patients as they often come with many side effects. Instead, those diagnosed with mild depression are being offered group therapy sessions before medication.
The study results
The Saudi Arabian study did a health check on the study group as part of the analysis. The participants included adults in the US who were diagnosed with depression but were not institutionalised. The average age of the participants was 48-years-old, and 67.9% of them were women.
Over half of the participants were on antidepressants while 43% were not, but still had a clinical diagnosis.
The researchers checked the participants' Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) score when they were first diagnosed, and a second time two years later. The HRQoL can be divided into two parts: mental and physical health. The average HRQoL score for a mentally and physically well adult is 90.
The participants that were on antidepressants had an increase of 2.9% in their mental health scores from an average of 40.32 to 41.50. Their physical health scores fell 1.5% from 42.5 to 41.85.
For those that weren’t on antidepressants, they had a 2.2% increase in their mental health scores from 42.99 to 43.92. Their physical scores dropped by 1.3% from 43.86 to 43.31.
What does this mean?
According to Dr Omar Almohammed, a clinical pharmacist at the Saudi university, the statistical difference between both groups is too insignificant and suggests that antidepressants don’t improve a person’s general quality of life.
However, independent experts have said that the Saudi Arabian study didn’t take into account the levels of depression of each person in the different groups.
Dr Gemma Lewis, a psychiatrist at University College London, said:
In this study, the people who received antidepressants had worse quality of life, and are likely to have been more severely depressed, than those who did not.
She added:
This type of bias is difficult to eliminate in a naturalistic study like this, which does not involve an experimental design.
Clinical trials with experimental designs have found that antidepressants improve mental health related quality of life.
Professor Eduard Vieta, a psychiatrist at the University of Barcelona, said:
The major limitation of this paper is that, as is often the case with these kinds of studies, the confounder by indication.
The inability to control for severity of depression between the two different groups is a crucial flaw and therefore there is little we can learn from this data.
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