Mixed News On Depression Drugs

(CBS/AP)  The largest study ever done on treating depression has found that patients who didn't get well with the first medicine they tried had a good chance of succeeding the second time around.

Up to one-third of those who added or changed medicines recovered from the crushing illness that is America's top mental health problem, researchers said.

This is good news by itself, but the bigger picture is even more encouraging, some doctors say. When viewed with earlier results, the new findings mean that roughly half of people who suffer from depression can get over it, not just improve their symptoms, with adequate medication.

"The goal here was to find treatments that help people to get well, not just better," said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "We have safe and effective treatments."

His agency paid for the $35 million study, which involved thousands of people across the United States and has been widely praised as a real-world test of popular drugs that have received only limited testing until now.

However, while the study showed that patients who do not respond well to one drug could be helped by another, the Washington Post reports that the results are also "discouraging for several reasons," David Rubinow, a professor and the chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said in an editorial published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which also published the study.

As the Washington Post reports, the findings trouble some doctors because it shows large numbers of patients continued to have problems, Rubinow said. Additionally, he noted that the drugs used in the study — Celexa, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and Effexor — work in very different ways yet had roughly equal effectiveness when it came to treating depression. This suggests that the underlying brain mechanisms of depression are far more complicated than simple notions of a single chemical imbalance, the Post reports.

The study found little difference among the five drugs tested, Celexa, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Effexor and Buspar, and wasn't designed to compare them. All proved similarly effective and relatively safe. The clear message, doctors said, was that antidepressants should be given a 6-to-12-week chance to work — and that if one doesn't help, another should be tried.

"It's important not to give up if the first treatment doesn't work fully," or causes side effects, said one study leader, Dr. John Rush of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

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