Combination of Lamotrigine and Quetiapine Superior to Quetiapine Alone
At a recent scientific meeting, researcher John Geddes and colleagues reported that compared to adding placebo to the treatment of bipolar depressed patients already receiving the atypical antipsychotic quetiapine, adding the mood stabilizing drug lamotrigine led to significant improvements in their illness. Lamotrigine was slowly titrated to doses of 200mg/day. (Slowly increasing dosage is important because a serious rash is a possible side effect of lamotrigine, occuring in about one in 5,000 individuals exposed.)
Researcher Charles Bowden found in 2000 that adding lamotrigine to valproate improved its effectiveness, as Marc van der Loos found in 2008 with lamotrigine and lithium. Thus it appears that adding lamotrigine to a mood stabilizer or to an atypical antipsychotic like quetiapine is a good second-line option in the treatment of bipolar depression. While lamotrigine is not FDA-approved for the acute treatment of depression, this approach is worthy of consideration, and could be of immediate clinical use. It provides an alternative to adding a unimodal antidepressant, which recent meta-analyses have indicated is not effective and which can increase switches into mania, cycle acceleration, or even treatment resistance in patients with bipolar disorder.
