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Studies Question Economics of Drugs
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Business New Haven
12/08/2003
By: BNH
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NEW HAVEN - Two Yale studies question the economics of medications in the two most widely prescribed and costly classes of psychiatric medications. One study found that a new and more expensive anti-psychotic drug is not more effective than an older, less costly one. The second study found that industry-associated economic studies of antidepressants favor the companies' new drugs when determining costs and cost-effectiveness.
Costs and value of newer medications are at the forefront of current debates including the purchase of medications from Canada and the new Medicare coverage of prescriptions.
The first study at 17 Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals compared an older, six-cents-a-day schizophrenia drug with a newer, $8-a-day one. There was little advantage to the higher priced drug, according to Robert Rosenheck, M.D., director of the VA's Northeast Program Evaluation Center in West Haven, a professor of psychiatry and public health at Yale Medical School, and lead author of the study in the November 26 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The researchers compared haloperidol, a typical antipsychotic, to olanzapine, the most expensive among the newer atypical antipsychotics. The study found no differences between the drugs in reducing schizophrenia symptoms or improving quality of life.
The second study by Bruce Baker, M.D., deputy director of the Treatment Research Program and assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry, found that economic studies of newer antidepressants sponsored by drug companies favor the companies' own drugs over the older drugs to a greater extent than studies that are not sponsored by the industry.
In 2002 newer antidepressants were listed as five of the top 20 drugs by sales dollars and accounted for over $9 billion in sales.
Baker's study, in the December issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, is the first to quantitatively analyze economic studies of psychiatric medications.
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