The New York Times (7/9, Barry) reports a systemic review and meta-analysis “found that a week after quitting antidepressants, patients reported symptoms like dizziness, nausea and vertigo,” but they mostly remained “below the threshold for clinically significant” withdrawal. Researchers criticized a 2019 UK study “that found that 56 percent of patients suffered from withdrawal symptoms” after discontinuing antidepressants for including “data from online surveys as a quantitative measure, for failing to control for the placebo effect, and for failing to distinguish between various types of antidepressants.” The new review, “based on 50 studies with more than 17,000 subjects,” found that “patients who had quit antidepressants were 5.5 times as likely to report dizziness, 6.4 times as likely to report vertigo and 3.1 times as likely to report nausea compared to placebo. But on average, the number of withdrawal symptoms had risen modestly, by only one compared with placebo, which is not considered clinically significant.” The review was published in JAMA Psychiatry. Psychiatric News (7/9) adds that “antidepressant discontinuation was not associated with greater depressive symptoms in the first two weeks compared with placebo, despite being measured in studies specifically examining major depressive disorder; this suggests that later presentation of depression symptoms is more likely to represent depression relapse, researchers wrote. (SOURCE: APA Headlines)