Higher Levels of Anger and Aggressiveness in Major Depressive Disorder Than in Anxiety and Somatoform Disorders

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Sir: Leung and colleagues^1, recently reported on the pretreatment of patients undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)with ibuprofen in an apparently successful attempt at reducing the incidence of post-ECT headache. One of the more interesting findings from their data, however, goes unmentioned in their discussion of the otherwise useful study. Table 1^(p552) in their article compares the placebo group and the ibuprofen group on a number of factors, one of which is seizure duration. Although the difference between the 2 groups did not meet the authors’ a priori significance level of .05, it did produce an interesting p value of .16 with those patients given ibuprofen, 600 mg, 90 minutes prior to the ECT treatment averaging a seizure duration almost 5 seconds longer compared with those given placebo.