Delayed Onset of Action of Antidepressants

摘要: In standard drug trials comparing antidepressants with placebo, a period of typically 3 weeks is required before formal statistical significance between treatments achieved. This delay has often been interpreted as indicating delayed onset action antidepressants. However, detailed analyses the time course recovery from depression demonstrate that ‘delayed onset’ hypothesis needs revision. The respective findings, now replicated across several differing antidepressant classes and suggest that: (i) among responders, improvement occurs in more than 70% cases within first treatment; (ii) there no evidence pronounced increase rates beyond this point; (iii) early highly predictive better later outcome.