New Meta-Analysis: Antidepressants Tied to a Significantly Increased Risk for Death

[JustAGuy]

This has been all over my Facebook after it was a top story on Medscape yesterday. Thought I would post here it for discussion.

Medscape: Medscape Access

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[hamstergang]

Certainly the article needs to be looked at, but I'm a bit skeptical that such a significant finding wouldn't have been seen before now given how long antidepressants have been around. It was over a decade ago that antidepressants were linked to suicidality in youth, so how was increased death not picked up then?

 

[nexus73]

This may not actually be a meta-analysis in the classic sense. Hard to tell what types of studies were used for their data.

 

[wolfvgang22]

I think depression and anxiety also significantly increase the risk of death.

I think antidepressants are not sold over the counter for a lot of good medical reasons. I don't see anything new in this article other than repeating caution about over prescribing of antidepressants. If this type of pattern doesn't sound familiar, it should - over prescribing is why we have an opioid epidemic.

Note the title of the journal. I'm not surprised it contains an article criticizing medication prescribed by primary care physicians without performing formal psychiatric exams. I wonder what the editors would recommend? Probably more psychotherapy. I don't disagree.

 

[slappy]

There are so many methodological issues with this meta-analysis that it would take me half a day to type them out. I'd encourage you all to read the paper yourself as I'm sure you'll catch them easily, if you're not put off by the overly biased introduction and continue reading that is. This is a prime example of the garbage-in-garbage-out dictum in statistics.