Saving lives or costing them?

The Food and Drug Administration is holding a hearing into whether certain kinds of antidepressants make some adults more likely to commit suicide, and the New York Times reports that the issue will be even more contentious than when the agency considered the same issue among adolescents.

In 2004, the FDA performed a meta-analysis of the results of randomized clinical trials of antidepressants and concluded that the drugs led to increased suicidal behaviors and thoughts, which it termed "suicidality," among children and adolescents. As a result, the FDA required manufacturers to place a black box warning on the labels of antidepressants - the strongest regulatory action the agency can take short of an outright ban. This has led to a decline in prescriptions of antidepressants for children and adolescents.

Carnegie Mellon Statistics Professor Joel Greenhouse, along with researchers at Ohio State University, has received a five-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to investigate the link between antidepressant use and suicidality among adolescents. A study published in April by the research team suggested that the FDA may have overstated the risk to most children and adolescents, and that only patients suffering from certain disorders, taking a specific class of antidepressants, were at increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. (There is no link, by the way, between suicidality and suicide itself.)

You can read more about Greenhouse's work here. To arrange an interview, email me at jpotts@andrew.cmu.edu.

Jonathan Potts