Experts question study linking increased child suicides to FDA antidepressant warnings.   In continuing coverage from previous briefings, the New York Times (9/14, A14, Berenson, Carey) reports that study data appearing last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry linking "a 2004 increase in the suicide rate for children and adolescents to a warning by the...[FDA] about the use of antidepressants in minors," might not "support that explanation, outside experts say." Although suicide rates "for Americans ages 19 and under rose 14 percent in 2004," the number of antidepressant prescriptions for "that group was basically unchanged and did not drop substantially." In addition, even though "prescription rates for minors did fall sharply a year later," suicide rates for 2005 "are not yet available from the" CDC, so the two cannot be compared. According to Thomas R. Ten Have, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the University of Pennsylvania, "There doesn't seem to be any evidence of a statistically significant association between suicide rates and prescription rates provided" for the years after the FDA warnings. The study's lead author, Robert D. Gibbons, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Chicago, "acknowledged that the data...that he and his colleagues analyzed did not support a causal link between prescription rates and suicide in 2004," adding that his own "study was suggestive" when taken within the context of other studies.