Posted by linkadge on July 15, 2006, at 22:09:11
In reply to Re: couldn't have said it better myself, posted by SLS on July 15, 2006, at 7:27:24
"I predict that the percentage of placebo responders in the STAR*D study will be much lower than you will see for any standard clinical antidepressant trial"
Why should this be so? Most clinical studies seem to show similar or worse statistics. I don't know of too many trials that show better statistics.
But, I would interprate the study this way. The study basically showed that if you have failed to respond to two antidepressnats, you are highly unlikely to respond to a different intervention.
I would personally see this as suggesting that those who responded to the first two drugs were likely placebo responders, and by the third drug, most placebo responders had been filtered out.
This is where the placebo arm would have been *very* usefull information.
Could you imagine, if reponse to the third pacebo had dropped similarly to response to the third active drug? That would confirm that each additional stage was filtering out more placebo responders.
Thats where I think these results are really meaningless.
Linkadge
poster:linkadge
thread:662854
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060709/msgs/667412.html