OAM/NIMH Sponsor Study of Hypericin Effectiveness
January 1, 1998 less than 1 minute read
OAM/NIMH Sponsor Study of Hypericin Effectiveness
Grant proposal requires using SSRIs as comparators
The Office of Alternative Medicine and Complementary Therapies (OAM) in Rockville, MD, has issued a grant to study the effectiveness of St. John’s wort extract for treatment of mild-to-moderate depression.Jonathan Davidson, MD, at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, will oversee the $4.3 million study.
In the original request for proposals, the OAM pointed to prescribing patterns of physicians in Germany, noting that more than 66 million prescriptions for St. John’s extract were written by German doctors in 1994.
The study will include a three-segment test group of 336 subjects. One group will receive a placebo, another will receive the standardized St. John’s wort extract, hypericin, used in European trials, while a third group will be treated with a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI). The RFP notes that the study’s intention is not to compare hypericin with SSRIs. Instead, the SSRI component was deemed necessary to provide an active comparator to document the sensitivity of the trial. If hypericin proves effective, the OAM recommends a more extensive study to compare hypericin with SSRIs.
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