Anxiety States in Family Practice: An Evaluation of the Need for Antidepressant as Well as Anxiolytic Therapy

Abstract

Patients attending their family practitioner with emotional disturbance manifesting predominantly as anxiety were treated once daily for 4 weeks with either a pure anxiolytic, potassium clorazepate, or a formulation of a specific antidepressant together with an anxiolytic, fluphenazine/nortriptyline, in accordance with a double-blind, completely randomized design. After the first week the patients receiving fluphenazine/nortriptyline were showing a better response in terms of total symptomatology as well as anxiety, tension and depression taken separately, and after 4 weeks treatment this trend reached statistically significant levels on both the physicians' ratings and the patients' self-ratings for overall symptomatology (p 0·05) as well as anxiety and tension on the physicians' scale (p 0·01). Side-effects were infrequent, with the exception of drowsiness which was complained of by 42% of the patients receiving clorazepate. Although simple and convenient to take, a once daily benzodiazepine formulation of fixed dose is likely to be too inflexible to achieve optimal therapeutic effect in many patients. These results are in accord with accumulating evidence for the importance of a depressive aetiology underlying the majority of so-called anxiety states in family practice. Anxiolytic, in the absence of specific antidepressant, therapy is unlikely to be adequate for these patients, and may lead to long-term palliative use of benzodiazepines incurring a risk of dependence.