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Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is the diagnostic label given to distressing and disabling symptoms of anxiety not due to another primary psychiatric disorder. GAD is common and often drives medical-care seeking in many patients. To document evidence of efficacy for GAD pharmacotherapy, researchers conducted a network meta-analysis of 89 randomized, controlled studies, published between 1998 and 2016, on 22 agents in 25,441 moderately anxious patients.
Most studies were placebo-controlled, and many used head-to-head comparisons; 18% of the studies were from China; few were conducted in seniors. Tolerability was measured by study dropout rates. The strongest evidence, based on large samples, was for duloxetine, venlafaxine, escitalopram, a…