It's hard to believe, but they go even further than that;Originally Posted by Junior
Umm... back to the topic - I've heard of kids as young as THREE being put on Risperdal. THREE??? How the heck can they justify that? Their brains are still developing. Surely they realise that it will interfere with that?
Babies Given Antidepressants In New Zealand
September 10th, 2007
Medical authorities are ‘mystified and concerned’ at figures suggesting antidepressant drugs are being prescribed for children, some less than a year old, according to a report in the New Zealand Herald. A look at records at Pharmac, the national drug buying agency, suggests thousands of scrips are being written annually for children under 10.
Normally, antidepressants aren’t usually prescribed to children younger than 8, and more commonly aren’t used on those younger than 13. And since depression isn’t found in babies – how could one tell, anyway? – docs contacted by the paper could see no reason for prescribing antidepressants for the wee ones.
The number of state-funded antidepressant prescriptions has nearly doubled since 2000 to more than a million a year, costing the Government about $30 million. Figures given by Pharmac to the United Future Party show 4,728 antidepressant scrips were written for kids younger than 10 in 2004-05, declining to 2,425 in the last June year.
Causing most alarm are the figures for babies, even though they dropped sharply during the three years. For 1-year-olds, 768 prescriptions were written in 2004-05, down to 24 by last year. For those under 1, there were 453 prescriptions in 2004-05 but only nine last year. The numbers also declined for other age groups under 10, but each group remained in the hundreds last year.
The decline likely reflect a government warning in 2004 that antidepressants could increase the risk of suicide.
“I can’t understand them,” Pharmac medical director Peter Moodie tells the paper, adding that wrong coding of dates of birth could explain the single-digit figures, “but when it’s hundreds, one assumes the figures are right”. Pharmac, he says, will re-check them and look to see which doctors had prescribed them to children and ask regulators to look at the issue.
United Future health spokeswoman Judy Turner said the figures were frightening. “Babies are born with only 15 per cent of their brain fully developed; 85 per cent of development happens from 0 to 3 years,” she tells the paper. “Surely the antidepressants will interfere with the hard-wiring of the children’s brains and influence their long-term wellbeing.”
The clinical director of paediatrics at Kidz First children’s hospital in Otahuhu, Wendy Walker, had never used antidepressants with babies, nor heard of anyone else doing so. “I would never prescribe them in my practice as a hospital-based acute paediatrician.”
John Werry, a child psychiatrist, says that “as far as we know” giving SSRIs to babies would not harm them. “But one doesn’t like to give growing and developing kids medications that affect basic bio-cyclic processes because it just doesn’t seem like a good idea unless the kid is really in severe difficulty.” He adds it would be rare prescribe antidepressants before the teenage years, and that the youngest child he had prescribed one to was a boy with autism aged 8 or 9, but that was “very exceptional”.
Auckland City Hospital neonatal paediatrician Simon Rowley says he would “never dream” of prescribing antidepressants to anyone under about 10, and was sceptical of the Pharmac figures.
More at;
http://www.pharmalot.com/2007/09/bab...n-new-zealand/
