Latest Fluoxetine Stories

Rat study offers new mechanism by which SSRIs like Paxil, Zoloft, may workHealthDay News -- Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a widely used class of antidepressant drugs that include Celexa, Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft, boost nerve fiber growth in key parts of the brain, according to a study with rats.The finding may help explain how SSRIs work and why it takes a few weeks before some antidepressants begin to have an effect.The research team from Johns Hopkins University found...

By Amy NortonNEW YORK -- The number of U.S. children and teens who were diagnosed with depression more than doubled between 1995 and 2002, while the use of antidepressant drugs rose and the use of psychotherapy or counseling declined.The findings, say researchers, point to possible instances of inappropriate prescribing to children.While guidelines call for children to be treated with either mental health counseling or a combination of counseling and medication, the study found a trend of...

By Amy NortonNEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The number of U.S. children and teens who were diagnosed with depression more than doubled between 1995 and 2002, while the use of antidepressant drugs rose and the use of psychotherapy or counseling declined.The findings, say researchers, point to possible instances of inappropriate prescribing to children.While guidelines call for children to be treated with either mental health counseling or a combination of counseling and medication, the study...

By Will Boggs, MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Contrary to the findings in rodent studies, a class of drugs commonly used to treat depression, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that include drugs such as Prozac, do not appear to increase the risk of breast cancer, according to a report in the American Journal of Epidemiology. "Physicians can feel confident that the evidence has accumulated that use of SSRIs for four to five years does not increase the risk of breast...

Howard Florey Institute scientists in Melbourne have found that fluoxetine (commonly marketed as Prozac®) not only improves depression in Huntington's disease, but also improves learning and memory. Dr Anthony Hannan and his team also found that fluoxetine restores the brain's process of neurogenesis - the birth of new neurons - to normal levels, which helps delay the onset of the inherited fatal disease. People with Huntington's disease have progressive motor problems, cognitive deficits...

LONDON (Agence de Presse Medicale) - Antidepressants should not be used as first-line treatment in patients younger than 18 years old -- even for moderate-to-severe or psychotic depression -- Britain's health economics watchdog, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, said on Wednesday. In children (5-11 years old) and young people (12-18) with depression, psychological therapy such as group cognitive behavior therapy should be the first-line treatment, backed up by advice on...

RESEARCHERS at the University of Manchester are testing our genetic disposition to depression with a unique internet test.The team, based at the Neuroscience and Psychiatry Unit (NPU), in the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, has set up a website (http://www.newmood.co.uk/ ) where would-be volunteers can see how prone they may be to depression by identifying the emotions on people's faces and also by taking a gambling test.The team aims to recruit more than 1000 UK volunteers for further...

Adult patients taking the antidepressant drug paroxetine are at higher risk of attempting to commit suicide than those not taking medication. A new analysis, published in BMC Medicine, of previous clinical data on paroxetine use adds the antidepressant to the list of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) that have been shown to increase suicidal tendencies in adult patients with depression. Ivar Aursnes and colleagues from the University of Oslo, Norway, reanalysed data from 16...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday upheld Eli Lilly and Co.'s patent for its premenstrual drug Sarafem, rejecting a challenge from generic drugmaker Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd . Teva had argued the patent, which covers the use of fluoxetine to treat premenstrual syndrome (PMS), was invalid because it was for something that was "obvious." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that found Teva had infringed the patent.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Heart attack patients who suffer from depression, something that happens in one of every five cases, can cut their risk of suffering another heart attack by taking antidepressant drugs, a study said on Monday. "Our study provides much stronger evidence than we've ever had before that antidepressants are safe and may benefit these patients," said C. Barr Taylor, a physician at Stanford University School of Medicine who was the lead author of the study. Depression and heart...