The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines state that tapering of the antidepressant Sertraline normally takes between 3 months and 2 years. However, in the ANTLER trial 70% people who had been taking depression pills for more than 3 years stopped taking them in a two month tapering regimen.
Questions have been asked of the design of the ANTLER trial. Some have even questioned the ethics of the design.
The full article can be accessed from here. [and is copied in full below]
The following letters comment on The ANTLER Trial and were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in November 2021. The reply by the ANTLER Study team reveals that a number of important and relevant considerations on antidepressant dependence and withdrawal were excluded from the original study. One has to ask why?
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