Feature

Antidepressants

An untold story?

This week’s headline story about antidepressants highlights the ongoing problem of how study results are often distorted by a failure to access full datasets. Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee report

New generation antidepressants aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. That seems to be the central message in the meta-analysis published this week by Irving Kirsch and colleagues in PLoS-Medicine,¹ and it was this message that made the headlines. Kirsch’s conclusion follows on the heels of similar studies showing that statins are useful in only a small subset of patients taking the drugs² and earlier studies showing that the safety and performance of cyclo-oxygenase-2 inhibitors seemed better than proved to be the case,³ further reinforcing previous criticisms that regulators in the United Kingdom and the United States are not doing their duty to protect the public from useless and dangerous drugs. But there’s another, deeper problem here—a problem that, ironically enough, was highlighted by GlaxoSmithKline’s news release stating that Kirsch’s conclusions are "incorrect" because he evaluated only a "small subset of the total data available." How can regulators, the . . . [Full text of this article]

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This article has been cited by other articles:

• Antonuccio, D. O, Healy, D. (2008). The researcher's credo. BMJ 336: 629-629 [Full text]  
• Geisler, F. H. (2008). Excessively closed science hurts. BMJ 336: 629-629 [Full text]  

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