Study Reveals Better Results in Patients Suffering From Depression.

Patients suffer from various psychiatric disease and they throng the hospitals for treatment. Statistics show that a third of these people suffer from mental depressions of different levels.

Drugs that are used to treat them had a lot of controversial opinion about them and hence a study was conducted to analyze the effect of these drugs on the patients.

The initial results were that the drugs showed better results in case of well-qualified white women. The patients seem to undergo better recovery in their first trail of antidepressants. Dr. Madhukar Trivedi at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center carried out this study, which was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health ($35 million).

But in the earlier times treating patients with depression was a very challenging task. The first set of antidepressants will not usually work with the patients and the doctors would have to mix and match various drugs in order to find the exact cure for the particular patient.

The study (STAR-D) involved monitoring of the doctors especially in the initial months of the antidepressant’s usage.

The main idea to go about with this study is that there were evidences proving that antidepressants on certain periods led to increased suicidal tendencies in children/teenagers.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ordered that the pharmaceutical companies include the risks of children on the product labels. The study also said that in the future they would analyze the adult risk of usage of these antidepressants.

The results of the study were that it did not show any suicidal tendencies among the subjects (3000) included in the study.

The STAR-D study, which is a six-year study, was analyzed in two steps.

In step one the patients were given a newer class of antidepressants of selective serotonin reuptakes (Celexa). It showed that white women who were well qualified and patients who suffered from less number of diseases recovered quickly with initial treatment than who had severe depression and a number of co-existing diseases.

Patients who were not cured moved to the second step where they were administered with different therapies for difficult to treat depressions.