Source: DGNews  |  Posted 8 years ago

By Alison Palkhivala

TORONTO, ON -- April 1, 2003 -- Psychic symptoms of anxiety, which are a common feature of both anxiety and depressive disorders, are generally responsive to sertraline therapy, according to analysis of data from nine double-blind studies.

Larry Culpepper, MD, Boston University Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues combined data across double-blind studies on the use of sertraline in depressive and anxiety disorders. These studies included four on panic disorder, two on post-traumatic stress disorder, one on social anxiety disorder, one on generalized anxiety disorder and one on major depressive disorder.

The findings were presented here in a poster on March 29th at the 23rd Annual Conference of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America.

Based on Hamilton Anxiety Scale (Ham-A) scores, mean baseline psychic anxiety scores were highest for patients with generalized anxiety disorder (25/13.7), panic disorder (23/11.6) and major depressive disorder (16/10.8). They were lowest among patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (20/13.4) and social anxiety disorder (10/6.4).

Results also showed that psychic anxiety symptoms contributed to a larger proportion of the baseline Ham-A total score in major depressive disorder (68%) and generalized anxiety disorder (56%), compared with the other disorders.

Treatment with sertraline resulted in significant improvement in the Ham-A total score compared with placebo in patients with panic disorder (P=0.005), social anxiety disorder (P=0.041) and generalized anxiety disorder (P=0.0001). However, it did not provide this benefit in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The analysis involved researchers from Pfizer, Inc., manufacturers of sertraline.

[Study title: Generalized and Psychic Anxiety Symptoms: Cross-disorder Prevalence and Responsivity to Sertraline Treatment. Abstract 12]