Psychiatric Pharmaceutical Agents as Efficacious as General Medical Drugs
“Psychiatric drugs and general medical drugs are equally efficacious, according to a review of a large number of meta-analyses.
Stefan Leucht, MD, from the Technische Universität Munich in Germany, and colleagues sought to provide a panoramic overview of the efficacy of general medication and then fit psychiatric drugs into that overview.
“It turned out that psychiatric drugs fell squarely in the middle,” Dr. Leucht toldMedscape Medical News.
There is a deep mistrust of psychiatry fostered by reports suggesting that the efficacy of psychotropic drugs is very small, he added. In addition, psychiatrists tend to be unfamiliar with the effectiveness of commonly used medical drugs.
The review is published in the February issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.
In the study, the investigators examined 33 meta-analyses of 16 different drugs used to treat the following psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
They also examined 94 meta-analyses of 48 drugs used to treat medical diseases, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic asthma, type 2 diabetes, and hepatitis C.”
