Efficacy and suicidal risk for antidepressants in paediatric and adolescent patients

A number of meta-analyses have been undertaken to assess both the safety and efficacy of antidepressants in paediatric and adolescent patients. This article updates the analyses with additionally reported trials. The aim of this analysis was to investigate whether antidepressant treatments are associated with an increased risk of suicide-related outcomes in paediatric and adolescent patients. Also, in the same population, to assess whether antidepressant treatments are beneficial in terms of efficacy. A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials of antidepressant treatments compared with placebo in paediatric and adolescent patients was undertaken of 6039 individuals participating in 35 randomised controlled trials. For suicide-related outcomes suicidal behaviour, suicidal ideation and suicidal behaviour or ideation were examined. These data presented the additional problem of the events of interest being rare. An analysis was described in this article to account for the rare events that also included studies which had no events on either treatment arm. There were trends to indicate that active treatments increased the risk of these events in absolute terms. For efficacy, the results indicated that antidepressant treatments did have a statistically significant effects compared to placebo but the effect was less for the trials in depression. The results are in the main consistent with previous meta-analyses on a smaller number of trials. There was evidence of an increased risk in suicide-related outcomes on antidepressant treatments, while antidepressant treatments were also shown to be efficacious.