Prozac Cost Savings Not Supported

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (July 26), exploring the idea that the use of newer drugs such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor Eli Lilly's Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride) may help to reduce total expenditure in antidepressant therapy, has concluded that there was no evidence to support this hypothesis.

In the first major randomized controlled trial of its kind, researchers from the Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, Washington, compared the cost-effectiveness of Prozac against the older tricyclic antidepressants, desipramine and imipramine, in 536 patients over a period of six months.

A Miracle Drug? Treatment of clinical depression costs $44 billion per year in the USA alone, and affects more than 16 million Americans. Since its launch in 1988, Prozac has been hailed as a wonder drug and it now dominates the antidepressant market in the USA. The wholesale cost of SSRIs, however, is some 10 to 20 times greater than their tricyclic counterparts, with US wholesale expenditures for SSRI drugs standing at $1.27 billion in 1994, according to the report. Previous trials have not demonstrated that SSRIs have any distinct advantage over the older tricyclics.