So says a new study.
So, put down the bon bons, get away from Jezebel and get out there & exercise, fatties of the world!
So, put down the bon bons, get away from Jezebel and get out there & exercise, fatties of the world!
Quote: (10-13-2014 12:25 PM)Seamus Wrote:
I preach this to people all the time. Exercise pumps up the endorphins in the short run no doubt, but being fit/looking good over the long run is what leads to elevated moods.
It's a virtuous cycle. You lift, you look good, you feel good, you lift some more. Rinse and repeat.
My problem is that after a lifetime of being active it's reached an extreme. I was recently sidelined a few months with an injury, and I was depressed as all hell watching my muscle slip away and fat increase, even though logically I knew I was still in better shape than 95% of the population. I'm afraid that exercise is almost too important to me now, if that makes any sense
Quote: (10-09-2014 06:56 PM)Jack198 Wrote:
So says a new study.
So, put down the bon bons, get away from Jezebel and get out there & exercise, fatties of the world!
Quote: (10-09-2014 08:26 PM)Dhorv9 Wrote:
I know this one girl from high school.
She is about 5'6", about 210 pounds real easy.
No job, plays pokemon all day, every time I have seen her she has a big gulp.
At this social gathering, she is talking about depression, how she is clinically depressed, how it 'just happens to people', and 'they don't know what causes it'. Wont take any steps to change anything unless its a pill.
I wonder if she started exercising, eating good, became useful in some kind of way, spent some time in the sun and in nature, and had a hobby thats not pokemon if her "depression" would alleviate.
If you mention this, you will be engulfed by the squawking of "YOU DONT UNDERSTAND DEPRESSION"
Some people will not listen to a single thing that requires effort
Quote: (10-13-2014 12:29 PM)The PerSev Wrote:
Quote: (12-27-2014 12:06 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:
Anti depressants are a massive scam.
Even in the rigged studies that Big Pharm puts out, they show no advantage over placebo, except in the cases of the most severely depressed patients.
I strongly suspect that even this modest advantage over placebo in a small subset of cases is due to the fact that anti depressants have rather noticeable side affects, so the studies aren't really blind. You would have to give patients a sugar pill that mimicked the side affect profile of the anti depressant being tested in order to have a truly blind and scientific study. This is vitally important, because the results of an anti depressant test are based on the Hamilton scale for depression, which is a subjective self reporting of a patient's mood combined with some very subjective non scientific physical observations by a psychiatrist. So if the patients realize they are being tested with the anti depressant, wishful thinking will color their self reporting and destroy the validity of the study.
Exercise, on the other hand, has a 100% effective anti depressant effect in both humans and animals. Take a depressed person, force them to exercise 30 mins a day for two weeks, and I guarantee the results will trump any medication available.
As for animals...I've spent time around horses...you keep em locked up in their stalls too much and they will bite things and become ornery. Same goes with people.
Also, exercise will maintain and improve your mental acuity and delay or prevent the onset of dementia. Anti depressants are good at making people half retarded and increasing their risk of dementia. I can't say enough bad things about anti depressants.
Quote: (01-02-2015 11:49 AM)monster Wrote:
This isn't true. I 100% agree that antidepressants are over-prescribed, but in patients where they work they are effective. I also agree that prescribing antidepressants without lifestyle modifications (exercise, healthy diet, CBT) is often useless, again they are remarkably effective for some people.
It's often a catch-22 with depression: people who are depressed simply cannot make the necessary lifestyle changes (exercise, health diet, etc) because serious depression sucks every motivation and positive thought out of them. So there's no easy solution because in cases of major depression saying "man up" just doesn't work because of the fucked up neural pathways.
Also, I'd add that St Johns Wort/5HTP/L-Dopa and other OTC supplements sometimes are just as effective if not more than the Big Pharma antidepressants. But it all comes down to the individual: although we're all the same biologically, we don't respond to all the same things when it comes down to these neurotransmitter details
Please don't miscontrue what I'm saying: exercise is probably the most effective antidepressant out there but medication & supplements have value too.
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BACKGROUND
Evidence-based medicine is valuable to the extent that the evidence base is complete and unbiased. Selective publication of clinical trials — and the outcomes within those trials — can lead to unrealistic estimates of drug effectiveness and alter the apparent risk–benefit ratio.
Full Text of Background...
METHODS
We obtained reviews from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for studies of 12 antidepressant agents involving 12,564 patients. We conducted a systematic literature search to identify matching publications. For trials that were reported in the literature, we compared the published outcomes with the FDA outcomes. We also compared the effect size derived from the published reports with the effect size derived from the entire FDA data set.
Full Text of Methods...
RESULTS
Among 74 FDA-registered studies, 31%, accounting for 3449 study participants, were not published. Whether and how the studies were published were associated with the study outcome. A total of 37 studies viewed by the FDA as having positive results were published; 1 study viewed as positive was not published. Studies viewed by the FDA as having negative or questionable results were, with 3 exceptions, either not published (22 studies) or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome (11 studies). According to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that 51% were positive. Separate meta-analyses of the FDA and journal data sets showed that the increase in effect size ranged from 11 to 69% for individual drugs and was 32% overall.
Full Text of Results...
CONCLUSIONS
We cannot determine whether the bias observed resulted from a failure to submit manuscripts on the part of authors and sponsors, from decisions by journal editors and reviewers not to publish, or both. Selective reporting of clinical trial results may have adverse consequences for researchers, study participants, health care professionals, and patients.
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Abstract
Background
Meta-analyses of antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance. Yet, the efficacy of the antidepressants may also depend on the severity of initial depression scores. The purpose of this analysis is to establish the relation of baseline severity and antidepressant efficacy using a relevant dataset of published and unpublished clinical trials.
Methods and Findings
We obtained data on all clinical trials submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the licensing of the four new-generation antidepressants for which full datasets were available. We then used meta-analytic techniques to assess linear and quadratic effects of initial severity on improvement scores for drug and placebo groups and on drug–placebo difference scores. Drug–placebo differences increased as a function of initial severity, rising from virtually no difference at moderate levels of initial depression to a relatively small difference for patients with very severe depression, reaching conventional criteria for clinical significance only for patients at the upper end of the very severely depressed category. Meta-regression analyses indicated that the relation of baseline severity and improvement was curvilinear in drug groups and showed a strong, negative linear component in placebo groups.
Conclusions
Drug–placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.
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Research on antidepressants[edit]
Kirsch’s analysis of the effectiveness of antidepressants was an outgrowth of his interest in the placebo effect. His studies in this area are primarily meta-analyses, in which the results of previously conducted clinical trials are aggregated and analyzed statistically. His first meta-analysis was aimed at assessing the size of the placebo effect in the treatment of depression.[7] The results not only showed a sizable placebo effect, but also indicated that the drug effect was surprisingly small. This led Kirsch to shift his interest to evaluating the antidepressant drug effect. Kirsch’s first meta-analysis was limited to published clinical trials. The controversy surrounding this analysis led him to obtain files from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) containing data from trials that had not been published, as well as those data from published trials. Kirsch’s analyses of the FDA data showed that the difference between antidepressant drugs and placebos was not clinically significant, according to the criteria used by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which establishes treatment guidelines for the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom.[8] Kirsch challenges the chemical-imbalance theory of depression, writing "It now seems beyond question that the traditional account of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is simply wrong." [9] In 2014, Christian Jarrett on the British Psychological Society's Research Digest, included Kirsch's 2008 antidepressant placebo effect study in a list of the 10 most controversial psychology studies ever published.[10]