Are antidepressants perceived to work better than they actually do?

William Atkins
Tuesday, 29 January 2008 19:38

Science - Health

According to a U.S. study that compared 74 clinical trials on the effectiveness of antidepressants: Studies that state antidepressants are effective are much more likely to be published than those studies that state antidepressants don’t work.             

Psychiatrist and former FDA reviewer Erick H. Turner and fellow colleagues looked at seventy-four clinical trials conducted at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

All of the studies combined concerned 12,564 clinically depressed patients who received at least one of twelve widely prescribed antidepressant drugs.

Turner is an assistant professor of psychiatry, physiology, and pharmacology at Oregon Health and Sciences University and the medical director at the Mood Disorders Program at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Portland, Oregon.

The FDA found 38 of them (about 51%) to have shown improvement in its subjects while on antidepressants. Thirty-seven of them appeared in print (about 97%), while one failed to be published (about 3%).

The FDA also found that 24 out of the 74 trials showed no benefits from the use of antidepressants. The agency found that the other 12 trials concluded mixed results from depressed people on antidepressants.

Of these 36 trials (those showing no benefit or mixed results), only 14 were published (about 39%), while the other 22 failed to be accepted for publication (about 61%).

In fact, the Turner team found that of these 14 no-benefit or mixed-result trials that were published, they were still given a positive tone to the benefit of using antidepressants.

According to the article “Antidepressants get overly positive spin” in Science News magazine (January 26, 2008), page 61, Turner said [paraphrased]: “The totality of evidence shows that each antidepressant alleviates depression better than placebos do…. However, selective publication of positive results inflates this antidepressant advantage….”

Turner and his colleagues are showing that antidepressants do work, but by making more-than-realistic statements of their effectiveness in journal articles, their benefit to depressed users is perceived to be much more than what it really is.

Additional information on this subject is found in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) article “A Taxpayer-Funded Clinical Trials Registry and Results Database: It already exists within the US Food and Drug Administration, which is written by Turner.

Conclusions from the Turner study follow....