BMJ 1995;311:55 (1 July)

Letters

Antidepressants and suicide

Study analyses were flawed

EDITOR,--Two recent articles look at use of antidepressants and death from suicide. John A Henry and colleagues have continued previous work and assessed the relation between death and defined daily dose.1 Unfortunately, the defined daily dose for dothiepin used in the paper (75 mg) should be 150 mg (references quoted by Henry and colleagues). The correct figure is then 3.08 deaths per million defined daily doses of dothiepin instead of 1.54--the second highest figure, after that for amoxapine. This agrees with a clinical study that showed that dothiepin has greater toxicity in overdose than other tricyclic antidepressants.2 We are also concerned about the statistical methods used by Henry and colleagues. It is unclear how valid confidence limits are in this context without a clear definition of x and how the standard error (not deviation) was calculated. It is inappropriate to use one tailed tests of significance . . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

Relative mortality from overdose of antidepressants
John A Henry, Carol A Alexander, and Ersin K Sener
BMJ 1995 310: 221-224. [Abstract] [Full Text]

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