Finding meanings

doi:10.1136/bmj.39511.393287.43

BMJ 2008;336 (8 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.39511.393287.43

Editor's Choice

Finding meanings

Jane Smith, deputy editor, BMJ

jsmith@bmj.com

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Antidepressants continue to dominate this week. Last week astudy in PLoS Medicine which claimed that newer antidepressantswere mostly no better than placebo (BMJ 2008;336:466, doi: 10.1136/bmj.39503.656852.DB)attracted wide attention in the media and some criticism inboth PLoS Medicine’s rapid responses and our own (www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/336/7642/466#191157).

This week Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee pursue one aspectof that study—its use of a "freedom of information" requestto get data from unpublished studies—to examine the issueof publication bias (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39504.662685.0F).Theyquote a study showing that among trials of antidepressants only8% of those with negative findings were published compared with97% of those with positive findings.

Two of the authors of that study, Erick Turner and Robert Rosenthal,write in the BMJ this week about their interpretation of thePLoS Medicine study (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39510.531597.80). Theyagree that antidepressants are less efficacious than . . . [Full text of this article]

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