Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder primarily affecting young women and marked by an extreme fear of becoming overweight that leads to excessive dieting to the point of serious ill-health and sometimes death. It is a serious psychiatric illness with a lifetime death rate arguably as high as that associated with any psychiatric illness, according to background information in the article. A major contributor to the poor prognosis of this illness is the high rate of relapse, with 30 to 50 percent of patients requiring rehospitalization within 1 year of discharge after successful weight restoration. This has prompted interest in interventions aimed at preventing relapse following weight restoration. A substantial number of patients with anorexia nervosa receive antidepressant medications. Fluoxetine was initially marketed under the brand name of Prozac.

B. Timothy Walsh, M.D., of New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University Medical Center, New York, and colleagues compared fluoxetine with placebo to determine the rate of relapse and behavioral recovery following initial treatment for anorexia nervosa. The trial included 93 patients with anorexia nervosa who had received intensive inpatient or day-program treatment and regained weight to a minimum body mass index (BMI) of 19.0. Participants were then randomly assigned to receive fluoxetine (n = 49) or placebo (n = 44) and were treated for up to 1 year as outpatients.

The researchers found that similar percentages of patients assigned to fluoxetine and to placebo maintained a BMI of at least 18.5 and remained in the study for 52 weeks (fluoxetine: 26.5 percent; placebo: 31.5 percent). The most conservative analysis of time-to-relapse found no significant differenc
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Contact: Dacia Morris
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JAMA and Archives Journals
13-Jun-2006