The NBM newsletter is back after a several month hiatus! Thank you for your patience and enjoy.

The Northwest Behavioral Medicine and Research Center newsletter is back after a brief hiatus. Thank you for your patience. Dr. Banov has a book called "Taking Antidepressants" that will be published by Sunrise River Press and will be available July 2010. Taking Antidepressants is consumer friendly books helping you decide how and when to start antidepressants, stay on antidepressants, and stop

"Are Antidepressants Safe?"

All medications carry some risks, and antidepressants are no exception. However, the risks of untreated or inadequately managed depression are far greater than those of the antidepressants. Fortunately, serious side effects with antidepressants are rare, but they do occur. You can prevent any significant problems by knowing what those risks are and what to do should you experience any such problems.

Government regulatory agencies, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require that new medications go through a rigorous scientific review process to assess their overall effectiveness and safety. Pharmaceutical research studies only give us a narrow picture of a medication’s true risks and benefits, because the number of patients participating in these studies is relatively small, and the studies are usually short in duration. Pharmaceutical companies are required to continually collect information about any serious problems associated with a medicine after it is approved for general use and make that information available to doctors and patients. Some very popular medications have been pulled from the market for safety reasons because of this reporting system.

Pharmaceutical companies are required to warn patients and doctors of all possible medication risks. These companies are held liable if there is a possible link between a medication and a bad side effect that they did not adequately inform the public about. This explains why more than half of a 30-second television advertisement for a medication is devoted to listing all the possible side effects you could experience. These monitoring and warning systems are far more sophisticated than in the past and should give you some sense of comfort about any medication you take.

People have more concerns about the safety of antidepressants than they do about medicines used to treat most other medical illnesses. Some of these concerns are generated by the occasional unsubstantiated news story about the overprescribing of antidepressants, the dangers associated with these medications, and pharmaceutical companies’ betraying the public trust by hiding safety data. Antidepressants provide easy targets for attention-grabbing news stories because so many people take these medicines, and there is a long-standing negative bias about mental health treatment. The slew of unfavorable portrayals of psychiatric illness and treatment in film and literature reinforce such biases.

Granted, there have been mental health treatments in the past, like in all areas of medicine, which, while well intentioned, had adverse outcomes. Nowadays, there are far better methods to study new medical therapies and regulatory agencies provide more aggressive oversight to prevent harmful treatments from being used. Antidepressants, as a class, are some of the best-studied medications on the market and have a long track record of being monitored for safety since their arrival in the late 1950s.

Our next newsletter will address the following:

· Possible serious side effects

· Risk of increased suicidal thoughts, worsening depression, or violence

· Medical risks associated with antidepressant treatment

· Drug interactions between antidepressants and other medication

· Long-term risks of antidepressants

We also have several new medication research studies currently being conducted:

Treatment-resistant depression

Partial responders to current antidepressant

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Alcohol Abuse

Depression

Children and Adolescent Attention Deficit Disorder

As always, studies include evaluation by a board certified psychiatrist, laboratory, study medicine, and follow up care all provided at no cost.

Call 770-422-2846 (Marietta) or 678-992-1019 (Alpharetta) for more details. Visit our website www.psychatlanta.com or email us at study @nbmedicine .com for more details.