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Paroxetine Demonstrates Continued Efficacy In Treatment Of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Presented at WCP

By Bruce Sylvester
Special to DG News

YOKOHAMA, JAPAN -- September 2, 2002 -- Short and long-term paroxetine treatment of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) results in a statistically significantly greater proportion of these patients attaining remission, researchers reported at the World Congress of Psychiatry in Yokohama.

The investigators made a retrospective analysis of the paroxetine OCD clinical database, evaluating it specifically for remission data.

Two of three short-term studies (12-week) were flexible dose trials (20-60mg/day), while the third was a fixed-dose trial (20, 40 and 60 mg/day). For the purpose of this retrospective analysis, the researchers combined data from these paroxetine groups.

The investigators included data from two long-term (12 month) relapse-prevention studies. The studies were extensions of two of the short-term studies. Responders to 12 weeks of paroxetine treatment received six months of open-label paroxetine, and were then randomized to receive either paroxetine or placebo for a further six months during the double-blind phase of the study.

For both the long and short-term studies, remission was defined as = 70 percent reduction from baseline in the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) score and CGI-Global Improvement score of 1 ("very much improved").

In the three 12-week studies involving a total of 790 subjects, more paroxetine-treated patients achieved >70 percent reduction from baseline in Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) score than placebo subjects (10.6 percent vs 5.3 percent; p=0.015), and more paroxetine-treated patients achieved a CGI-Global Improvement (CGI) score of 1 than placebo (15.2 percent vs 7.3 percent; p=0.002).

In the two 12-month relapse prevention studies, the original investigators had randomized 138 responders to 12 weeks open-label paroxetine treatment or placebo. Remission rates remained sustained in paroxetine subjects but fell in the subjects switched to placebo (>70 percent reduction in YBOCS: 32.4 percent paroxetine vs 11.4 percent placebo, p=0.004; CGI score of 1: 45.6 percent paroxetine vs 21.4 percent placebo, p=0.004).

"These findings confirm the efficacy of paroxetine in OCD and demonstrate the benefit of continued long-term therapy," the authors concluded.

The study was supported by GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals.

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