As I mentioned above, I have personal experience with Prozac (generic name is Fluoxetine). Basically, Prozac is just another antidepressant. There are three reasons why it has become a household word. One is that it is one of a family of antidepressants (SSRIs) which have more moderate side-effects than the older antidepressants. Many patients are [...]

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Antidepressants are far less effective than doctors and the public may have been led to believe, a new study has claimed. Eighty – eight per cent of clinical trials that showed the drugs were less than effective either were not published in medical journals or were presented as positive findings, according to the study in [...]

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Children as young as eight may soon be able to use the antidepressant drug, Prozac, following a recommendation by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA). Prozac (fluoxetine) is an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). SSRIs are the most commonly prescribed class of antidepressant. The drug is authorised for the treatment of major depressive episodes, obsessive compulsive [...]

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Do antidepressants work? They do. New evidence comes from a study of children and adolescents, patients in age groups where the efficacy of antidepressants has been hard to demonstrate. It’s just the sort of research that critics of drug trials ought to find convincing. Antidepressants seem to do less good in the young. For decades, [...]

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The antidepressant, Prozac, may help to curb disease activity in a particular form of multiple sclerosis (MS), new research indicates. A team of researchers followed the progress of 40 patients with the relapsing remitting form of MS. MS is a condition which affects the brain and spinal cord. It is characterised by a slowly progressing [...]

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There’s major news on the antidepressant front, but it comes in an odd form: research on treating “lazy eyes” in rats. A study suggests that, yes, Prozac and similar medicines really do make the brain more flexible. The report, titled “The Antidepressant Fluoxetine Restores Plasticity in the Adult Visual Cortex,” appears in the current issue [...]

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The New York Times science section today features an essay on the long-term use of antidepressants. The lead refers to the sort of question I introduced in Listening to Prozac: how do these medications shape identity? But most of the piece concerns the biological effects of taking the drugs for years. The author, Richard A. [...]

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A new study has indicated that new generation antidepressants only benefit the most severely depressed people. According to the findings, these drugs ‘do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even severe depression’. As part of the study, a team from the University of Hull in the UK [...]

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