[At least some people still have some common sense]
Monday, 10 September 2007
Authorities baffled at baby anti-depressant prescriptions
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4196699a10.html
Government drug buying agency Pharmac is baffled by antidepressant
prescription figures for very young children and is facing the task of
re-checking each one.
Pharmac records suggest thousands of prescriptions a year are being written
for children under 10, a newspaper report says.
They are not usually prescribed to children younger than eight, and more
commonly are not used on those younger than 13.
Depression is not found in babies and doctors spoken to could see no reason
for prescribing antidepressants for them.
They are powerful psychiatric drugs with potentially severe side-effects.
"I can't understand them (the figures)," said medical director Dr Peter
Moodie.
Wrong coding of dates of birth could explain the single-digit figures, "but
when it's hundreds, one assumes the figures are right";.
Dr Moody said Pharmac would look to see which doctors had prescribed the
antidepressants for children.
The Government's drugs regulator, Medsafe, warned in 2004 that
antidepressants could increase the risk of suicide.
For children and adolescents, it said, the risk of suicidal ideas and
behaviour from newer antidepressants called selective serotonin re-uptake
inhibitors (SSRIs) generally outweighed their benefits.
Older "tricyclic" antidepressants were not generally recommended for those
under 18 because of the risk of heart problems.
The number of state-funded antidepressant prescriptions has nearly doubled
since 2000 to more than a million a year, costing the Government about $30
million.
Figures given by Pharmac to the United Future Party show 4728 antidepressant
prescriptions were written for children under 10 in 2004-05, almost halving
to 2425 in the last June year.
Causing most alarm are the figures for babies, even though they dropped
sharply during the three years.
For one-year-olds, 768 prescriptions were written in 2004-05, down to 24 by
last year. For those under one, there were 453 prescriptions in 2004-05 but
only nine last year.
The numbers also declined for every other age group under 10, but each group
remained in the hundreds last year.
Antidepressants are used for conditions including severe depression, anxiety
disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and bulimia nervosa.
The tricyclic type were previously used to control bed-wetting, but this
could not explain the prescriptions for babies.
Commonly reported side-effects of the SSRIs fluoxetine and paroxetine
include diarrhoea, insomnia, sleepiness and tremors.
Pharmac yesterday said that the figures were correct but but that it was
mystified by them.
.
