Prozac may no Longer be the Right Treatment for Depression

Anyone looking for a treatment for a moderate case of the depression, knows the first stop to make - antidepressants. One isn't really sure how, every professional out there could have come to think otherwise, but research conclusively says now, that antidepressants are really no use, in any but the deepest cases of depression. No better than a placebo. They tried this study with two popular antidepressants, Paxil and Imipramine. Paxil is quite new, a drug that belongs to a class of medications known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI). It is surprising that they should find this out now; the FDA wouldn't have passed this drug for the market unless it proved itself to be far better than a placebo. The placebo test of course, is something researchers try on patients, to see if a new drug is really effective. They give a group of patients the drug deal they are er trying to test, and they give another group of patients, something that looks like the drug being tested, but is really a sugar pill. The real drug, is supposed to prove itself to be far better than the sugar pill. But when the mind believes that it is being given the real drug, sometimes the body believes it's too. And reacts by curing itself. Even if the drug being given as just a sugar pill. A new drug, to be passed, needs to be proven better than a placebo.

However, antidepressant treatment does really work for patients who have a very serious case of it. Studying people who battle deep depression every day of their lives, the researchers try to use a scoring system to place on a scale how depressed subjects in the study really are. They found that antidepressants actually helped patients with depression that hovered around the top of the scale at 24, quickly drop down halfway down the scale, to around 12. The people on the placebo, could only claim half that kind of improvement. But study subjects who come in with a case of depression that rates no higher than, say 20 on the scale, improve no better on the drugs than they do on the placebo. This entire study is beginning to give doctors and scientists something to think about in the way they understand the standard treatment for depression.

So why is it, the scientists ask, that antidepressants don't work on people with anything less than a serious case of depression? There have been studies done on mice, that seem to help explain the problem. Antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft, usually work by helping the brain manufacture more of the happiness hormone serotonin, in the very depths of the brain. If the area of the brain that actually manufactures it, is kind of saturated with the receptors for this hormone, it no longer responds to any treatment for depression with antidepressant drugs. There are no ready-made answers on how to proceed from here. Scientists are trying to genetically engineer mice that have brains with different levels of serotonin receptors in different areas of the brain. And dialing down the number of receptors in an area, right away sets the brain up to be more responsive to Prozac. That's where research is headed now in helping people respond better to treatment for depression.