The lead author of the study is Dr. Julio Licinio, the new chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. Licinio conducted the study at UCLA while he was the director of the Center for Pharmacogenomics and Clinical Pharmacology at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
Published in the June 2006 edition of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Medicine, the study analyzes federal data on overall suicide rates since the early 1960s and sales of the SSRI fluoxetine, or Prozac, in the United States since the antidepressant's introduction in 1988 through 2002.
The data show the U.S. suicide rate held fairly steady for 15 years prior to the introduction of fluoxetine, then dropped steadily over 14 years as sales of the antidepressant rose. The research team found the strongest effect among women.
Mathematical modeling of probable suicide rates from 1988 to 2002, based on pre-1988 data, suggests a cumulative decrease in expected suicide mortality of 33,600 people since the introduction of the antidepressant.
"Our findings certainly suggest that the introduction of SSRIs has contributed to reduction of suicide rates in the United States," Licinio said. "However, the findings do not preclude the possibility of increased risk of suicide among small populations of individuals."
The Food and Drug Administration introduced "black box warnings" on the most popular SSRIs in 2004 amid rising concerns in the United States and United Kingdom concerning the relationship between suicide and antidepressant use in children and adults.
A key unanswered question involves whether antide
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Contact: Dan Page
dpage@mednet.ucla.edu
310-794-2265
University of California - Los Angeles
12-Jun-2006