The study that paved the way for prescribing the antidepressant Paxil to millions of adolescents was seriously flawed, marked by what appear to be attempts to play down harms such as an increase in suicidal behavior by younger people who tested the drug, according to a reanalysis released Wednesday.
Using 77,000 pages of previously unavailable documents, a team of researchers concluded that paroxetine, marketed as Paxil by drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, was no more effective than a placebo and considerably more dangerous than the original study indicated.
Similar criticism of what is known as "Study 329" began within a year of its publication in 2001, but Wednesday's reappraisal in The BMJ, a medical journal, may be the most thorough yet.
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