Warnings that antidepressants might increase the risk of suicidal behavior in youth curbed rapid growth of these drugs but did not eliminate access to them among young people as some had feared, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
They said that while antidepressants had been growing at an annualized rate of 36 percent before regulators made the warnings in 2003, that growth flattened out after the warnings were issued.
Doctors have assumed that a spike in teen suicide in 2004 reulted from a sharp fall in use of antidepressants among children and youth.
That was not the case, according to Dr. Mark Olfson of Columbia University Medical Center.
"When the warnings first appeared, there was a great deal of concern among psychiatrists and other mental health professionals that these warnings would result in a precipitous decline in antidepressant use by young people, and as a result, youth with depression would have less access to treatment," said Olfson, whose study appears in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
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