According to the results of the new research, antidepressant medications do not help individuals with the obsessive stealing disorder kleptomania.
The study was conducted by the scientists from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The findings appear to be surprising to specialists in the mental health field, where kleptomania is known as a extremely stubborn disorder.
"Kleptomania does not reaxct very well to anything at all," explained Dr Norman Sussman, a professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. "Even treatment is frequently useless. Individuals will steal things even after being caught. It’s really a compulsion."
Some medicines may help
However, the authors of the research did not exclude the chance that particular medicines, even the ones used in the study, might still appear to constitute a successful treatment for some patients.
Kleptomania drives sufferers to spontaneously steal inexpensive and unneeded things or objects. Unlike shoplifting, stealing associated with kleptomania is not planned and is not motivated by any necessity or financial gain.
According to background information in the research, it has been estimated that kleptomania accounted for 4 to 10 per cent of shoplifting in the United States. With shoplifting leading to estimated yearly losses of $10 billion to $50 billion, kleptomania’s toll is considerable.
"Individuals suffering kleptomania seek treatment very seldom, due to the fact that they are frightened of the legal consequences or are not aware that treatment may be helpful," explained the author of the research, Dr Lorrin Koran, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. "Some patients do benefit from the therapy."
Earlier study indicated benefit
An earlier "open-label" research demonstrated a 78 per cent success rate with antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). However, open-label trials, in which information concerning who is taking medicines and who is taking a placebo is public, are notoriously unreliable.
"In open-label trials, it only seems like they might be effective," Sussman explained. "It’s wishful thinking."
For the latest research, published in the March issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the scientists monitored 24 people aged twenty or more who had been diagnosed with kleptomania at least one year before.
The partakers were randomly assigned to take either the SSRI escitalopram (Lexapro) or a placebo. The research was financed by Lexapro’s manufacturer, Forest Laboratories. Response rates appeared to be the same in both groups, indicating that the earlier findings in the open-label trial were due to a placebo effect.
No benefit seen
In the second stage of the research, carried out as a double-blind, placebo-controlled test with fifteen participants only, no benefit was observed. Nearly the same proportion of partakers relapsed in each group.
According to the authors of the study, the small size of the research means that the potential of this therapy ca not be dismissed.
"Some of these patients informed me that they had undergone a lot of other therapies, had been in jail, divorced, nothing prevented them from thinking about stealing," Koran explained. "But when they took the medication, they weren’t thinking about it. They didn’t have the compulsion. It’s difficult to believe that that’s a placebo effect."
Koran supposes that the disorder is much more complicated than specialists claim.
"I suspect that this is a behavior that has different biological roots in different people," he explained. "For some, the medication was active on serotonin and probably was successful, and for others, it was a placebo effect. It’s also probable that the medication was effective for some and lost its effect. If we had increased the dose, they may have continued to observe a benefit. We are on the outside looking in, and we do not know what’s going on in the brain.
However, others didn’t necessarily agree.
"This doesn’t contradict the weight of evidence," Sussman said. "This only acknowledges what we already suspected."
No help for obsessive buying
Another study, carried out by the same scientists scrutinizing the same medication discovered that Lexapro also did not help individuals with compulsive buying disorder.
Again, this finding disagrees with previous results from an open-label test demonstrating a benefit. The latest research, a randomized one, involved only seventeen partakers.
