SAM-e - Too Good To Be True?
There is almost no available information about the product. It sells from anywhere between $16 and $38 for a bottle of 20 pills, which at the rate of two a day can burn a fairly deep hole in the wallet, especially when health plans don't pick up the tab. Nevertheless, more than enough people believe they are getting a bargain, particularly when it holds out the promise of bringing one back from the living dead, which is what depression is.
The wonder pill is called SAM-e, and a new book, "Stop Depression Now" by Brown, Bottiglieri, and Colman (Putnam, 1999), trumpets on its front cover: "The breakthrough supplement that works as well as prescription drugs in half the time ... with no side effects."
Sound too good to be true? We are told SAM-e has been prescribed in Europe for more than twenty years and that in Italy it outsells Prozac. One of the authors of "Stop Depression Now", a psychiatrist at Columbia University, claims he has used the supplement on his patients with successful results for five years and another author has dedicated his life to research it.
SAM-e - short for S-adenosylmethionine - is a molecule found in our bodies and is vital to a process called methylation, where one molecule passes a methyl group (one carbon and three hydrogen atoms) to another molecule. It's a transaction essential to more than a hundred processes in the body, from the brain to the bones. Levels of SAM-e are notably lower amongst depressed people of all ages.
Because of the universal nature of methylation, SAM-e has also been found to work well for arthritis and the liver, and may have other yet-to-be discovered uses. As to how the process applies to the brain, scientists still don't know. Their best guess is that Sam-e may affect neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine or their receptors, but then again they could be wrong.
In all, there have been some 40 studies - virtually all European - involving 1,400 depressed patients that typically show SAM-e working in a matter of days (as opposed to four to six weeks with antidepressants) with virtually no side effects. The sampling is small by FDA standards, and the authors of "Stop Depression Now" fail to cite an instance of a trial of SAM-e going head to head with Prozac or other SSRIs, though "the evidence looks promising," according to a Harvard psychiatrist quoted in Newsweek.
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