An untold story?

doi:10.1136/bmj.39504.662685.0F

BMJ 2008;336:532-534 (8 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.39504.662685.0F (published 27 February 2008)

Feature

Antidepressants

An untold story?

Jeanne Lenzer, medical investigative journalist, New York, jeanne.lenzer@gmail.com, Shannon Brownlee, senior fellow, New America Foundation, Washington, DC, shannon.brownlee@comcast.net

This week’s headline story about antidepressants highlightsthe ongoing problem of how study results are often distortedby a failure to access full datasets. Jeanne Lenzer and ShannonBrownlee report

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

New generation antidepressants aren’t all they’recracked up to be. That seems to be the central message in themeta-analysis published this week by Irving Kirsch and colleaguesin PLoS-Medicine,¹ and it was this message that made the headlines.Kirsch’s conclusion follows on the heels of similar studiesshowing that statins are useful in only a small subset of patientstaking the drugs² and earlier studies showing that the safetyand performance of cyclo-oxygenase-2 inhibitors seemed betterthan proved to be the case,³ further reinforcing previous criticismsthat regulators in the United Kingdom and the United Statesare not doing their duty to protect the public from uselessand dangerous drugs. But there’s another, deeper problemhere—a problem that, ironically enough, was highlightedby GlaxoSmithKline’s news release stating that Kirsch’sconclusions are "incorrect" because he evaluated only a "smallsubset of the total data available." How can regulators, the. . . [Full text of this article]

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Antonuccio, D. O, Healy, D. (2008). The researcher's credo. BMJ 336: 629-629 [Full text]
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