Study did not consider treatment efficacy

BMJ 1995;311:55-56 (1 July)

Letters

Study did not consider treatment efficacy

EDITOR,--The papers on suicide and antidepressants in the issueof 28 January develop our understanding of this problem further.John A Henry and colleagues point out the differences in therate of death by overdose for different antidepressants¹ butfail to relate this to efficacy and the fact that only 4-5%of all suicides are due to an overdose of antidepressant.² SusanS Jick and colleagues show that many people taking antidepressantscommit suicide but do not give data on the number of suicidesthat occur in untreated depressed patients.³ Interestingly,they found a distinct difference in crude rates of suicide betweenpeople taking tricyclic antidepressants (7.4 (range 4.7-8.7)suicides/10000 person years) and people taking non-tricyclicantidepressants (flupenthixol, mianserin, fluoxetine, or trazodone;14.9 (12.0-19.0) suicides/10000 person years). The further analysesof fluoxetine, the antidepressant with the highest crude rateof suicide (19.0/10000 person years), suggested that this ratecould partly . . . [Full text of this article]

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Relevant Article

Relative mortality from overdose of antidepressants: John A Henry, Carol A Alexander, and Ersin K Sener
BMJ 1995 310: 221-224. [Abstract] [Full Text]