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Anti-depressant Leads to Suicides

Seems to me that if an anti-depressant can lead to someone committing suicide, it's not a very good anti-depressant, is it?

GlaxoSmithKline is going to get slammed on a British expose for withholding the results of their clinical trials, advertising the drug as safe for children when the test results showed otherwise.

GSK was forced to reveal its confidential internal archives after many families in the US had sued the company over the death of their children due to consuming the drug. Karen Barth Menzies, whose firm represents one of the families, said that GSK continued to say that the drug was safe for children even when results proved the contrary.
...
When Panorama reporter Shelley Jofre searched the confidential archives, she was shocked to find many of the letters that she had sent to Dr Ryan [a child psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh who was the co-author on GSK's study] asking about the safety of the drug among children. Dr Ryan had simply forwarded the mails to GSK officials asking for suggestions for the replies.

Jofre also found an email in which a public relations executive for GSK clearly said that the drug was not effective among children. "Originally we had planned to do extensive media relations surrounding this study until we actually viewed the results. Essentially the study did not really show it was effective in treating adolescent depression, which is not something we want to publicize", the email read.

Meanwhile a spokesman for GSK said that his company denies of any wrongdoing...GSK utterly rejects any suggestion that it has improperly withheld drug trial information", he said.

That's right. They very properly withheld the drug trial information, following the guidelilnes listed in the Pharmaceutical Drug-Pusher's Handbook: A Guide to Successfully Selling Your Merchandise to the Public. It's always worked well for their drugs in the past, and every pharmaceutical corporation swears by it.

By min | January 29, 2007, 12:50 PM | Science