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【medical-news】哪些人需要抗抑郁药？（一）
答案可能超乎你的想像
～美国人为什么需要抗抑郁药？
抗抑郁药存在过度使用吗？
～人们担心：抗抑郁药到底安全吗？
Antidepressants: Who Needs Them?
The Answer: More People Than You Might Think; One Expert Explains Why
ESSAY by JAMES POTASH, M.D.
July 18, 2007
Psychological experts worry that additional suicide warnings on depression meds could deter some patients from needed treatment. (Photo Disc)
A woman who had been depressed for 20 years with frequent thoughts of suicide started Prozac, and, 10 days later, said "it felt like a switch was flipped. I felt normal for the first time."
Another woman had sunk into depression after the birth of a child, and had begun to think she was a bad mother, as she could not enjoy her baby. She started the antidepressant Remeron, and within two weeks was feeling cheerful and spirited again.
Antidepressants are truly miracle drugs for some patients.
Last week, a number of major media outlets highlighted a 2004 report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The report showed that antidepressants were the most prescribed medication class, surpassing nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and anti-asthmatics.
Should this surprise us? Are antidepressants being overused?
A Brief History of Antidepressants
Fifty years ago, there were no antidepressant medications. In 1957, Roland Kuhn in Switzerland reported that the chemical N-(gamma-dimethlaminopropyl)-iminodibenzylhydrochloride, which came to be called imipramine, had a striking effect on patients with depression.
"They again become interested in things, are able to enjoy themselves, despondency gives way to a desire to undertake something, despair gives place to renewed hope in the future," he wrote.
In the same year, iproniazid, a tuberculosis (TB ) drug was reported to lift the moods of some TB patients who were depressed. These two medications were the first of the tricyclic and monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) antidepressants, which were widely prescribed for the next 30 years.
But these medications have important side effects that made physicians cautious about their use. The MAOI antidepressants can cause dangerous, even lethal, changes in blood pressure in patients who consume foods such as aged cheeses, drinks such as red wine, or medications such as other antidepressants that interact with the MAOIs.
Similarly, the tricyclic antidepressants can be lethal if used in excessive amounts as happens when patients intentionally take an overdose, which depressed patients sometimes do.
By the 1980s, scientists had some idea about how antidepressants work. Brain chemicals called neurotransmitters seemed to play a role.
Two of them in particular, norepinephrine and serotonin, were decreased in the brain in depression, and increased in response to antidepressants. Scientists at Eli Lilly and Company developed a drug that could specifically increase serotonin levels in the brain, and Prozac, the first serotonin selective reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI, was born.
Prozac was free of the dangerous side effects of the MAOI and tricyclic antidepressants, and thus it could be prescribed more liberally by physicians, including those without psychiatric expertise, such as internists, obstetrician/gynecologists, and family practitioners.
The use of antidepressant medications has risen dramatically since that time. One study showed that the use of SSRIs and other newer antidepressants increased by 26 percent every year between 1989 and 2000 in primary care.
Whereas antidepressants were prescribed in 6.3 million visits in 1989, they were prescribed in 20.5 million visits in 2000.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Depression/story?id=3389691&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312 本人认领此文，48小时后交稿 [标签:content1][标签:content2]
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-02-14 18:24
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