Anxiety disorders are highly common all around the world and they are a significantly high concern among US adults. Jeffrey Strawn, from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati, has worked on evaluating the treatments for these disorders.
There are more than 4.4 million kids and adults living with anxiety disorders as per reports by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These disorders do not get the attention that they deserve but an untreated condition could drastically affect the quality of life. A new study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health analyzed the quality and efficacy of these treatments to find out how helpful they are for treating patients. The complete findings of this analysis are published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
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The specialized medicines and the psychotherapy help to reduce these symptoms in people but using the serotonin reuptake inhibitors, also called SSRIs proves to be most beneficial.
These SSRIs help by improving the serotonin behavior in the brain. The human brain uses this serotonin to communicate with other brain cells. using these medicines stops nerve cell reabsorption of the serotonin which enables the body to improve serotonin availability and the communication between cells.
But it is necessary to know that it is also possible for children not to go well with the current medicinal treatments. The SSRIs are the first choice of treatment for all these anxiety patients and the improvements in every patient vary in every person. For most people, the trial and error method helps to find the right type of medicine and plan.
In addition to this, there is not much information if this treatment will be of any help, especially among teenagers.
In this study, the researchers tried to find out the effect of escitalopram on generalized anxiety disorder patients.
A total number of 51 patients between the ages of 12 to 17 were picked to test the efficacy of treatment. They were monitored for eight weeks kept on escitalopram or placebo effect.
The symptoms in these patients were checked especially towards the medicinal response. They found that SSRI medicines were extremely helpful in overcoming anxiety symptoms. But many of these patients reported different effects such as restlessness, sleep irregularities, and fatigue which leads to one thing that may be dosage planning should be improved.
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Some patients are naturally more responsive to this treatment than others. Usually, those with a slow metabolism experienced low impact or received the impact late than the others. Those with a high metabolism for this medicine were more active and respondent to this anxiety treatment.
This is the first study on the SSRI which studied anxiety disorders in teenagers. It also provides answers to physicians about treating teenagers.
