Athens, Ga. -- A University of Georgia study has found that three-quarters of people prescribed antidepressant drugs receive the medications for a reason not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

This practice, known as off-label prescribing, is legal and intended to give physicians the flexibility to prescribe the drugs that are best suited to their patients' needs. And while study authors Dr. Hua Chen and Jack Fincham acknowledged that there are legitimate uses for off-label prescribing, they said that in many cases physicians write off-label prescriptions based on limited or anecdotal evidence.

"Most off-label drug mentions have little or no scientific support," said study co-author Jack Fincham, A.W. Jowdy Professor of Pharmacy Care at the University of Georgia College of Pharmacy. "And when I say most, it's like 70 to 75 percent. Many patients have no idea that this goes on and just assume that the physician is writing a prescription for their indication."

The study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, examined rates of off-label prescribing for drugs that act on the central nervous system. The researchers found that 75 percent of antidepressant recipients, 80 percent of anticonvulsant recipients and 64 percent of antipsychotic recipients received at least one of these medications off-label.

Chen, an assistant professor at the University of Houston who lead the study when she was a doctoral student at UGA, said the findings reveal a significant gap in the nation's drug safety system. The FDA approval process is widely regarded as the world's most rigorous, but off-label prescribing regularly exposes consumers to drugs that are untested for their condition.

"There's a big gap between this very strict approval process and this very liberal utilization practice," Chen said. "Something must be done to fill this gap."

The researchers examined data on drugs
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Contact: Sam Fahmy
sfahmy@uga.edu
706-542-5361
University of Georgia
25-Jul-2006