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Eighty-five potential psychiatric drugs are under development for use in the United States, according to a recent survey of more than 500 pharmaceutical companies by the Washington, D.C.-based Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
The survey includes both U.S. companies and foreign companies conducting trials in the United States for the U.S. market.
All of the medications are either undergoing human clinical trials or awaiting approval by the Food and Drug Administration. They include 23 potential treatments for dementias such as Alzheimer's disease, 19 for substance abuse disorders, 18 for depression, 15 for schizophrenia, and 10 for other disorders.
There are more than 65 approved drugs available to treat mental illness, and pharmaceutical companies are expected to spend an estimated $4.8 billion in 1998 alone on research and development of central nervous system drugs, according to PhRMA.
"Over the past half century, pharmaceutical research has helped transform mental illness from a misunderstood cause of shame and fear into a highly treatable condition," said PhRMA President Alan Holmer. "The 85 medicines in development to treat mental illness show the promise to continue the extraordinary progress already made."
Despite the achievements of the pharmaceutical industry, the cost of psychiatric drugs in the U.S. is higher than the costs of the same drugs in 16 other countries in North America and Europe, according to a study released last month by Washington, D.C.-based Public Citizen Health Research Group. Except for the U.S., all of the countries studied have a national health system in which the national government negotiates drug prices, the approach favored by Public Citizen, according to Sidney Wolfe, M.D., director of its Health Research Group. The Public Citizen study looked at drugs including clozapine, fluoxetine, and risperidone, and found that U.S. costs for such drugs were 1.7 times to 2.9 times higher than those in the other countries.
According to PhRMA, the cost of treating an episode of acute depression in the U.S. declined by about 25 percent from 1991 to 1995. The PhRMA survey may be found on the Web at: www.phrma.org. Click on "New Medicines."