Paxil is a safe and effective treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in children and adolescents, according to the results of a short-term study published in the November issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Dr. Daniel A. Geller, of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and colleagues examined the safety and efficacy of Paxil for the treatment of children and teens with OCD.

One hundred subjects were randomly assigned to receive Paxil and 107 were randomly assigned to receive placebo, a “sugar pill,” for 10 weeks. The main measure of the drug’s effectiveness was the change from the start of the study in scores on the Children’s Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (CY-BOCS). The average CY-BOCS total score at the start of the study was 24.8, indicating moderate-to-severe OCD.

A total of 203 patients were included in the analysis, with 72 (35.5 percent) having another psychiatric illness. The other conditions most often observed were attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (9.4 percent), generalized anxiety disorder (6.9 percent), and bed-wetting (6.9 percent).

After adjusting the data for other possible contributing factors, the average change in CY-BOCS at week 10 was -8.78 points for patients who received Paxil and -5.34 points for those who received placebo, a statistically significant difference, Geller and colleagues report.

A total of 10.2 percent of Paxil-treated patients and 2.9 percent of placebo-treated patients discontinued treatment due to an adverse event. Most adverse events were mild to moderate. Three patients in the Paxil group and one in the placebo group experienced serious adverse events.

The results suggest that Paxil is a “viable treatment for children and adolescents with OCD,” the authors conclude.

Noting that the sample was “ethnically restricted” - 88.2 percent of the population was Caucasian - and that this was a short-term study, the authors add that “further long-term studies are required to determine whether these encouraging efficacy and tolerability characteristics of [Paxil] for pediatric patients with OCD are maintained with extended use.”

SOURCE: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, November 2004.