Drug maker, Pfizer's antidepressant reboxetine, comes as an "ineffective and potentially harmful" drug and the data presented on the same states that the drug does not live up to the promised standards, claims German researchers.

The study published in the British Medical Journal, involved researchers from the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) who stated that approximately three quarters of the data on patients which involved the trials of reboxetine has not been released as of now.

Reboxetine, is traded under the brand name Edronax, and has been authenticated by all major depressive disorder in most of the European countries since 1997, however doubts over its effectiveness and its application for approval in the United States is since 2001.

Beate Wieseler of IQWiG's department of drug assessment, who did the study explained, "It is not a major drug in depression but every patient that is treated with an ineffective drug is one too many. Depression is a severe disease and there are effective drugs available, so if a patient is given an ineffective drug, that is unacceptable."

Reboxetine is considered as one of the very first anti-depressant drugs known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

A Pfizer spokesman said the drug was "an effective treatment option" for acute depression and it provides a thorough review of the BMJ studies.

The German team pondered over the findings based on 13 trials of reboxetine, involving eight previously unpublished trials from Pfizer, and found that the drug was ineffective in curing depression and may have harmful side effects.

The study posted: "Published data overestimated the benefit of reboxetine versus placebo by up to 115 percent and reboxetine versus SSRIs by up to 23 percent, and also underestimated harm."