posted July 19, 2003 06:33 PM
Drug Maker Looking to Treat Compulsive ShoppersFri Jul 18
By Toni Clarke
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Can a pill be the answer for shoppers who go out to buy a battery and come home, quite inexplicably, with a plasma TV?
Forest Laboratories Inc. is sponsoring a trial at California's Stanford University designed to show that its antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro can cut down on compulsive shopping.
Both these drugs, part of a class known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, were first approved to treat depression.
But makers of SSRIs, which include Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Eli Lilly and Co., are seeking ever wider definitions of diseases that might accommodate their products.
Many SSRIs have won regulatory approval to treat anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and, more recently, "social phobia," or excessive shyness. Now compulsive shopping, compulsive gambling and kleptomania may be added to the list.
While compulsive gambling and kleptomania are recognized in the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual as examples of "impulse control disorders," compulsive shopping is not.
That doesn't mean Forest might not make hay from a successful trial.
"Forest has done several of these types of studies to help draw attention to their drugs but in reality any of the SSRIs are just as effective in treating these kinds of conditions," said Norman Sussman, Professor of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center. "They are part of the obsessive-compulsive spectrum,"
Yet Lorrin Koran, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University Medical Center and lead investigator on both the shopping and the stealing trials, said effects on shoppers taking the drug can be pronounced.
"I'm very excited about the dramatic response from people who had been suffering for decades," he said. "I've never seen anything like it. No disorder I've treated has reacted like this."
But some are skeptical and say drug companies may be attempting to redefine "normal" behavior as "compulsive" in order to spur greater sales.
"There's a greater and greater attempt by the pharmaceutical companies to define normal behaviors as signs of illness and therefore as something that can be treated by their products," said Allan Horwitz, a Professor at Rutgers University and author of "Creating Mental Illness."
Horwitz said uncontrollable shopping, like kleptomania, affects a tiny number of people.
"It's a very rare condition, but if it's defined liberally enough it could encompass millions of people who like to shop, who do it frequently, and may come to think of themselves as having a disorder when there is nothing wrong with them."
Still, until compulsive shopping is recognized as a disease as reflected in the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual, most drug companies don't plan to study it as a specific condition.
"We have never studied it in isolation and we have no plans to," said Nancy Leone, a spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline, which makes the antidepressant Paxil.
Forest did not return calls seeking comment.
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posted July 19, 2003 06:33 PM
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posted July 20, 2003 02:52 AM
"My name is Randall, and I like to buy stuff." 