RESEARCH - Bias toward upbeat findings on antidepressants

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Antidepressant Studies Unpublished

By BENEDICT CAREY

The New York Times

Published: January 17, 2008

The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the

results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win

government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs' true

effectiveness, a new analysis has found.

In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report

significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of

those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are

included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a

modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New

England Journal of Medicine.

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Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/health/17depress.html

Read the abstract of the study here:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/3/252

Not an MD