Drug Effectiveness: Overblown
As reported in the Psychotherapy Networker Jab/Feb 2010 edition, a professional magazine for the psychotherapy profession:
Erick Turner and other researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University subpoenaed the FDA to release all the studies on antidepressant effectiveness in its archives. Because science journals prefer positive findings over negative ones, Turner and his colleagues were unsurprised to find unpublished studies concluding that SSRIs are no more effective the placebo*
(Definition- Placebo: a. A substance containing no medication and prescribed or given to reinforce a patient’s expectation to get well. b. An inactive substance or preparation used as a control in an experiment or test to determine the effectiveness of a medicinal drug.) (Definition-SSRI: selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitor – an antidepressant drug that acts by blocking the reuptake of serotonin so that more serotonin is available to act on receptors in the brain)
They were astonished by the number of such negative studies. Reseaarch reporting positive effects for antidepressants was 12 times more likey to be published than studies reporting negative results. Turner & colleagues concluded that publication bias had inflated the common impression of the effectiveness of SSRI’s by about a third overall, and for some medications, the figure was twice as high.
Indeed, it now appears that the early widely touted success of SSRI’s was based on an overly simplified methodology and cherry-picking of results. A meta-analysis (analysis of many studies) shows that between 42 and 47% of subjects respond to the placebo. They conclude that an effect of 10-15% greater than placebo hardly justifies psychatiatic and popular confidence in SSRIs as the first-time treatment for one of the most common mental disorders.
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