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About a decade after the Food and Drug Administration first warned that antidepressant medications increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children, new research has found that kids and young adults starting on high doses of antidepressants are at especially high risk, especially in the first three months of treatment.
Among patients 24 and younger, those who started treatment for depression or anxiety with a higher-than-usual dose of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI, were more than twice as likely to harm themselves intentionally than those whose treatment began at the customary dose and increased slowly, the study found.
For every 150 such patients treated with high initial doses of SSRIs-antidepressantsmarketed under such commercial names as Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac, Celexa and Lexapro-the study suggests one additional suicide would be attempted. By contrast, young patients starting SSRI therapy at doses considered customary were at only slightly elevated risk of self-harm, about 12 percent above the level of their depressed peers not taking medication.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-05-antidepressants-self-harm-dose.html
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