The Suicide Drug

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet. Posted April 28, 2008.

Ask about published reports of 470 completed suicides of people on antidepressants since Prozac debuted in 1988 and the drug industry will say that's depression for you. Without our drugs, it would be worse.

But how does Eli Lilly and Co. explain the mounting suicides of people given Cymbalta (duloxetine) for urinary incontinence or peripheral neuropathy?

The planned debut of Cymbalta, now Lilly's number two drug, was even delayed by the suicide of a non-depressed person in 2004.

Traci Johnson, a healthy 19-year-old college student volunteer enrolled in a Cymbalta trial hung herself by a scarf from a shower rod in Lilly's Indianapolis, IN laboratory while withdrawing from the drug.

Johnson showed no outward signs of depression and Lilly said she had been screened for mental problems, but staff conducting a concurrent Cymbalta trial made comments about her "mental history" to at least four participants -- perhaps to keep them from dropping out of the trials as a fifth of volunteers did after the suicide.

After Johnson's death, Lilly was ordered to stop accepting new volunteers for the study and to have continuing participants evaluated by an independent psychiatrist and sign new consent forms. But in another Cymbalta trial of 4,124 depressed patients just weeks later, four more participants took their lives, according to a Lilly clinical psychiatrist, Dr. John R. Hayes.

Meanwhile, reports from abroad, where duloxetine was already in use as a stress urinary incontinence treatment called Yentreve, were just as grave.

Twice the expected number of suicide attempts among middle-aged women were seen with the drug -- 400 per 100,000 person-years versus a baseline of 160 per 100,000 person-years -- said the FDA on its Web site in June, 2005, leading Lilly to abruptly withdraw its application to sell Yentreve in the U.S.

Safety data for Cymbalta and Yentreve obtained by reporter Jeanne Lenzer under a Freedom of Information request for an Independent Sunday article disclosed 41 deaths and 13 suicides, which did not include Johnson's or the four cited by Hayes, says Lenzer.

In fact, in an article titled," Duloxetine: new drug. For stress urinary incontinence: too much risk, too little benefit," in the December 2005 issue of French medical journal Prescire International, the authors conclude that the drug should not even be in use:

"More than 40 different types of adverse effects have been reported, including suicide attempts and potentially severe hepatic disorders. Duloxetine is metabolized by the cytochrome P450 isoenzymes CYP 1A2 and CYP 2D6, creating a risk of interactions with other drugs that follow these metabolic pathways. In practice, purely symptomatic treatments that have no documented efficacy but many adverse effects should not be used, especially when there is an alternative treatment with a positive risk-benefit balance."

See more stories tagged with: suicide, depression, eli lilly, cymbalta, duloxetine

Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist for the Evanston Roundtable.

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