Title: Continued Antidepressant Treatment and Suicide in Patients with Depressive Disorder
Abstract: Abstract Antidepressant use in Denmark, as in many developed countries, has substantially increased during recent years, coinciding with a decreasing suicide rate. In a nationwide observational cohort study with linkage of registers of all prescribed antidepressants and recorded suicides in Denmark from 1995 to 2000, we investigated the relation between continued treatment with antidepressants and suicide in a population of all patients discharged from hospital psychiatry with a diagnosis of depressive disorder. Patients discharged from hospital psychiatry with a diagnosis of depressive disorder had a highly increased rate of suicide. Those who continued treatment with antidepressants had a decreased rate of suicide compared with those who purchased antidepressants once (rate ratio: 0.31, 95% confidence interval: 0.26–0.36). Further, the rate of suicide decreased consistently with the number of prescriptions. On individualized data from a cohort of patients with a known history of depressive disorder, continued antidepressant treatment was associated with reduced risk of suicide. Keywords: antidepressive agentspharmacoepidemiologysuicide The study was funded by the Lundbeck Foundation and Slagtermester Max W⊘rzner og hustru Inger W⊘rzners Mindelegat. The sponsors of the study had no role in the study design, data collection, data analyses, data interpretation, or writing the report. The sponsors had no access to the data, the results, or the manuscript prior to submission.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-03-21
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref', 'pubmed']
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Cited By Count: 31
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