Rational antidepressant selection in the elderly.

Proper selection of antidepressant therapy is of growing importance as new and unique agents are added to the therapeutic armamentarium. Physicians must expend some effort in becoming familiar with the current treatment choices to facilitate selecting agents tailored to the needs of individual patients. The criteria that should be considered in antidepressant selection, assuming equal efficacy at appropriate therapeutic dosages, include propensity of a drug to produce side effects, patient and family history of response to previous antidepressant therapy, pharmacokinetics, ease of administration, drug interaction potential, and emerging data that suggest differential efficacy in specific depressive syndromes.