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Friday, April 27 2007 @ 08:12 AM Central Daylight Time
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 New research suggests that the swing moods from depression to mania that affect people with bipolar disorder can be tempered with drugs like lithium; it is not helpful adding an antidepressant drug to ease the depression component.
According to the report in The New England Journal of Medicine, depressive episodes are the major cause of disability for people with bipolar disorder which was formerly known as manic depression. But there were few have assessed the benefits of standard antidepressant drugs in treating bipolar depression.
There were 366 patients with bipolar depression who was involved in the study, who were at random selected to receive for 26 weeks, mood stabilizer drugs in blend with a standard antidepressant or inactive "placebo".
Dr. Gary S. Sachs, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues report that the tough recovery was defined as at least 8 consecutive weeks of having a non-depressed and non-manic mood and it was achieved by 23.5 percent of patients in the combination therapy group, which was not notably different from the 27.3 percent of patients in the comparison group.
The patients, who had rates of 10.1 and 10.7 percent, respectively were no more probable than to those given only mood stabilizers to experience a manic episode.
But these new findings, according to a related editorial are probable to have slight impact on physicians' opinions concerning with the use of antidepressants to patients with bipolar disorder.
Dr. Robert H. Belmaker, from Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva Israel stated predicts that ‘by the study there were strongly beliefs about the efficiency of antidepressants in treating bipolar depression, and their equally powerful risk of inducing mania, will not be put to rest’.
He believes that ‘the findings will lead to lesser use of antidepressant medication in patients with bipolar depression but treatment will continually to be individualized’.
Eliza Maledevic
http://www.primeherbal.com/Relagen/
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