Treatment Of Severe Acne May Increase Risk Of Suicide Attempts

Treatment Of Severe Acne May Increase Risk Of Suicide Attempts.
Severe acne may significantly enhancement suicide risk, and patients taking isotretinoin (Accutane) for the pellicle influence should be monitored for at least a year after treatment ends, Swedish researchers report. "Treatment with Accutane truly entails an increased risk of suicide attempts," said lead researcher Anders Sundstrom, a pharmacoepidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. However, recess caused by the acne, rather than the hypnotic itself, is probably the culprit.

The risk of suicide is very small. There could be one suicide go among 2300 people taking Accutane, and that assumes that the drug caused the suicide attempt. For the study, published online Nov 12,2010 in BMJ, Sundstrom's gang collected matter on 5756 people treated for severe acne with Accutane from 1980 to 1989. The middling age of the men was 22; the average age of women was 27.

Linking these patients to hospitalization and ruin records from 1980 to 2001, they found that 128 of the patients were hospitalized because of a suicide attempt. Suicide attempts increased in the several years before Accutane was started, but the highest gamble was seen in the six months after treatment ended, Sundstrom's collection found.

It's possible that patients whose skin improved became distraught if their social biography didn't benefit, the researchers speculated. Also, Accutane takes time to work and acne can get worse before it gets better. "It takes a long time to get rid of the acne, and for the self-image to get better might bilk even a longer time".

Acne so severe that it is treated with Accutane is not a trivial disease, said Parker Magin, a older lecturer at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, and co-author of an accompanying chronicle editorial. "It is a disease associated with significant psychiatric morbidity". It's ridiculous to say whether the drug or the skin disease is responsible for the increased suicide attempts.

Magin agrees physicians must prepositor patients taking Accutane for evidence of psychiatric problems. And since the risk exists before and after taking the drug, "we have to be circumspect for longer than the six months people might be on the medication". Patients with severe acne who do not get treated and those who are treated unsuccessfully should also be watched for psychiatric disturbances, the researchers said.

Isotretinoin, which has been occupied to act toward severe acne since the 1980s, is also sold under the brand names Roaccutane, Amnesteem, Claravis, Clarus and Decutan. Accutane has been linked to blood defects, and in 2005 the US Food and Drug Administration approved a program requiring doctors to enroll patients who learn it in a national registry to look after against serious side effects.

To register, patients must acknowledge the risks associated with the drug, including bust and suicidal feelings. Moreover, women must have a pregnancy test within seven days before contents their prescription article source. Women must also agree to use two methods of birth control and adhere to pregnancy testing on a monthly basis.