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H E A L T H / M E D I C I N E
Nonsense, say scientists who favor sharing such data. The reason
some studies remain unpublished is that the drug companies don't
like to admit negative results. According to Dr. Martin Teicher, a
researcher at McLean Hospital outside Boston who has published case
reports linking suicide and Prozac use, an internal Eli Lilly study
of adults taking the drug showed "a substantially greater incidence
of suicide attempts in people in the study receiving Prozac than in
people receiving placebo or other antidepressants."
But that study wasn't published, he says, while research showing
no increase in suicide attempts was. Says Dr. Richard Harrington, an
expert in child and adolescent psychiatry at England's University of
Manchester: "It's very important that things get peer reviewed.
There is no question about that. But if you have to make decisions
about giving drugs to children, you might sometimes have to go on
unpublished reports."
Starting this week, the FDA will try to make sense of it all: the
studies, published and unpublished; expert testimony from both
sides; and the personal stories of ordinary people like Mark Taylor,
19, wounded in the Columbine school shootings by Eric Harris, 18,
who was taking the antidepressant Luvox at the time.
The agency could come to a decision by next summer, but it might
not be as well informed as some would like. The truth, suspect many
psychiatrists, is complicated: SSRIs help some people and hurt
others. Says Teicher: "To figure out what impact [SSRIs] have on a
side effect like suicidal thoughts that might only affect a couple
of percent — or even less than 1%--of people in a study, you need a
much, much larger study." And, says Teicher, nobody is doing those
studies yet. Besides, argues Koplewicz, SSRIs are most often
prescribed for kids by pediatricians or family practitioners, not by
experts in child psychiatry. "We need to train these physicians
properly," he says, "not ban drugs that are clearly effective."
— Reported by
Melissa August/Washington, Helen Gibson/ London, Hilary
Hylton/Austin and Sora Song/New York
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