This makes me fighting mad: Military continues off-label drug use

via Broken Warriors
BY BOB BREWIN 09/28/2011

This is the fifteenth story in an ongoing series.

a few excerpts:

"The U.S Central Command continues to back the use of Seroquel, a powerful antipsychotic, to treat insomnia in troops deployed to combat zones despite an expert panel's recommendation six months ago to cease the practice. The drug, known generically as quetiapine, has been linked to adverse effects, including heart failure.

In May, the Defense Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee at its semiannual meeting said that the Food and Drug Administration had not approved any drugs in the class known as atypical antipsychotics, which includes Seroquel, for treatment of insomnia. Nonetheless, CENTCOM has approved the use of Seroquel in low, 25-milligram doses to treat sleep disorders.

In minutes of that meeting signed Aug. 5 by Dr. Jonathan Woodson, assistant secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, and posted to its website the same day, the committee said, "the use of low-dose AAPs [atypical antipsychotics] should be discouraged due to the lack of supportive evidence, risk of adverse events (metabolic and cardiac) and lack of monitoring (e.g. EKG) for adverse events in theater."

The Defense Health Board, a federal advisory group chartered to provide independent advice to the secretary of Defense, recommended in a draft report last month that Defense review its current guidance on the off-label or non-FDA-approved use of drugs, including Seroquel.
The pharmacy committee urged CENTCOM to use less dangerous drugs to treat insomnia. It said, "Other drug options to treat insomnia are available on the CENTCOM formulary, which have a lower risk of adverse events than the AAPs." Researchers at Vanderbilt University and the Nashville Veterans Affairs Medical Center reported in a January 2009 New England Journal of Medicine article that patients prescribed atypical antipsychotics, including Seroquel, had a significantly higher risk of sudden death from cardiac arrhythmias and other cardiac causes than patients who did not take these medications."

"An Army doctor who declined to be identified for publication, said he found it "quite remarkable that despite clear opposition to the continued use of the antipsychotics by [Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for] Health Affairs, and the [Pharmacy and Therapeutics] Committee, CENTCOM and the services continued to defend their use, all the while without anything but weak anecdotal evidence of efficacy."  read

hat tip:
D. Bunker at Psychiatry, It's a Killing

Bunker has a whole lot more on his site check it out!