Citalopram (Celexa) may help Shopaholics

An intriguing study with compulsive shoppers suggests that citalopram (marketed in the U.S. as Celexa) helped calm their compulsion to shop. The small pilot study looked at 24 compulsive shoppers and the results suggest that further study is warranted.

The study had an unusual design. In the first seven weeks all subjects took citalopram and at the end of this stage of the study their Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale-Shopping Version score decreased from 24.3 to 8.2. A second stage of the study compared placebo and citalopram, finding that many of the placebo subjects relapsed.

Read a research summary at Neurolink