SSRI Drugs Shown As Better for Youth Anxiety Disorders

For children and adolescents who require medication to treat anxiety, there are two primary classes of antidepressants that are prescribed: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and selective serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs). 
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​"For a long time there had been this sense that SSRIs work better than the SNRIs in treating anxious youth, but there wasn’t clear evidence to back this up, so we wanted to put that notion to the test,” says Jeffrey Strawn, MD, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the UC of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and lead author on the study.   

"What we found is that with the SSRIs, compared to SNRIs, people get better faster and see greater improvement overall. There had been some suggestion of this in some individual studies, but this is the first to evaluate the magnitude and trajectory of treatment, or in other words, how much and how quickly people get better.” 

To read the complete article at University of Cincinnati HealthNews, click here.