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Part 2: Torn to Shreds: The unheralded epidemic of disease and death wrought by anti-anxiety drugs

A double whammy



Part 1: “I’ve lost everything” Part 2: A double whammy The article was buried in the New York Times health blog: “Anti-anxiety drugs tied to higher mortality.” The article referred to a study, published March 19 in the online version of BMJ, by psychiatrist Scott Weich of the University of Warwick and his colleagues.
They searched the General Practice Research Database, the largest database of its kind in the world, and compared patients who had received at least two prescriptions for anti-anxiety or hypnotic drugs with a set of control patients, matched for age and sex, who had received none. Patients were followed for an average of 7.6 years. Only patients who survived for at least one year after their first prescription were included in the analysis, in order to eliminate patients suffering from terminal illness. Over the course of the follow-up period, the researchers found an average of four extra deaths per hundred patients prescribed anti-anxiety or hypnotic drugs. The disparity persisted even after controlling for a wide range of potential confounding factors, including age, sex, sleep disorders, anxiety disorders, other psychiatric disorders, non-psychiatric medical disorders, alcohol use, and smoking. The increase in death rate was dose-related; patients receiving the highest doses of these drugs had the highest death rate. In an interview, Doctor Weich stated “Our estimates of risk are by no means the largest that have been reported, so we’re pretty confident that they’re valid.” Dr. Weich stressed that this data set did not include information as to cause of death, but noted that other studies had linked these drugs to a variety of life-threatening conditions, including cancer, respiratory infections, falls, road accidents, and so forth.

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Dr. Weich mentioned that he does prescribe these drugs to his own patients, but added “The really big issue is that these drugs have kind of a double whammy. They’re very very necessary in certain instances, but they’re also very addictive drugs, so it’s very difficult once prescribed for more than a few weeks it becomes difficult to stop.” Doctor David Healy, psychiatrist and author of Pharmageddon, who was not involved in the study, concurred. “Back the 1960’s we were very aware that all drugs that could be helpful were in fact poisons, and there was a real art to medicine which involves producing a good outcome from the use of a means that could be risky.” Dr. Healy went on to note that the culture of medicine has changed, that substances which once were regarded as poisons now are treated more like fertilizers, to be spread as widely as possible. “This has really begun to be about getting as many people on as many drugs as you can.” He added that he has never called for any drug to be removed from the market and that he, like Dr. Weich, does prescribe these drugs to his own patients. “But I’m terribly concerned about the culture we have in which they are treated like candy.” How did we get to this point?

List of Sources

  1. Weich, S. personal interview 7 April 2014, 011-44-2476 574708, Division of Mental Health and Wellbeing, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, West Midlands CV4 7AL UK, s.weich@warwick.ac.uk.
  2. Healy, D. personal interview 10 April 2014, 011-44-1248-716568, david.healy54@googlemail.com.
  3. Bakalar, N. 2014. Anti-anxiety drugs tied to higher mortality. New York Times 27 March 2014.
  4. Weich, S. et al. 2014. Effect of anxiolytic hypnotic drug prescriptions on morality hazards: retrospective cohort study. BMJ 2014;348:g1996 doi: 10.1136bmj.g1996.
  5. Healy, D. 2013. Pharmageddon. University of California Press.


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Patrick D Hahn -- Bio and Archives

Patrick D Hahn is the author of Prescription for Sorrow: Antidepressants, Suicide, and Violence (Samizdat Health Writer’s Cooperative) and Madness and Genetic Determinism: Is Mental Illness in Our Genes? (Palgrave MacMillan). Dr. Hahn is an Affiliate Professor of Biology at Loyola University Maryland.



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