Published 19 August 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b3380
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b3380

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Antidepressants surpass antihypertensives as most commonly prescribed drugs in US

Janice Hopkins Tanne

1 New York

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Use of antidepressants in the United States almost doubled from 1996 to 2005, and in 2005 antidepressants surpassed antihypertensives to become the most widely prescribed class of drugs in primary care and in hospital outpatient clinics, a study has found.

The study, by Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry (2009;66:848-56).

The authors compared sociodemographic and clinical patterns of antidepressant treatment between 1996 and 2005, using information from the household component of the 1996 and 2005 medical expenditure panel surveys (MEPS).These are sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The surveys covered a nationally representative sample of household members aged older than 6 years and included 18 993 people in 1996 and 28 445 in 2005.

From 1996 to 2005 . . . [Full text of this article]


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