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Archive for January, 2015

not their round…

( OPINION )

When I open a medical journal and look at an article, there’s something called a by-line under the title that lists the authors of the article, usually with some little subscripts that lead to a footnote that lists the academic institutions they represent. Sometimes there’s one name. Sometimes it looks like a small army. But […]

polythetic polymorphism…

( OPINION )

In latter day STAR*D I…, I was looking at a study [Depression is not a consistent syndrome: An investigation of unique symptom patterns in the STAR*D study] where the authors demonstrated the wide diversity of symptom profiles among the subjects enrolled in the STAR*D Clinical Trial, yet all carried the same diagnosis [Major Depressive Disorder]. […]

a must-read article!…

( OPINION )

An Internal Medicine residency in a charity hospital in Memphis Tennessee in the 1960s was an encounter with Hypertension [High Blood Pressure] of the first kind. The patient population was weighted towards African Americans and we served not only the urban poor of Memphis, but also the rural areas of West Tennessee, Eastern Arkansas, and […]

a special pleading

( OPINION )

In the days when those ancients first disuncovered the rules of logic and logical argument, they must’ve thought they’d found the path to determine absolutes, something like the truth. Alas, it was short-lived, because the senator on the other side of the forum rose and eloquently used those self-same rules of logic and logical argument […]

latter day RCTs – the re in re·search

( OPINION )

I sometimes refer to the years since 1980 as the age of antidepressants or the age of psychopharmacology, but I would be closer to the mark if I called it the age of clinical trials. Not only were the pharmaceutical companies turning them out, the NIMH [then under Director Steven Hyman] was regularly funding them. […]

latter day STAR*D II…

( OPINION )

Scales like the HAM-D, BDI, MADRS, CDRS, IDS, QIDS, etc are designed to quantify the gamut of depressive symptoms. They’re either administered by a trained rater or self-administered. And they’re used both to certify diagnosis and to follow the progress of treatment in Clinical Trials of MDD [Major Depressive Disorder]. The Q-LES-Q was developed for […]

latter day STAR*D I…

( OPINION )

The initial fanfare with the SSRIs introducing the Antidepressant Age [Prozac 1988] was followed by a period of disillusionment as the lower than hoped [hyped] response rates became apparent. While the logic behind what came next isn’t totally clear to me, the non-responding patients were seen as having Treatment Resistant Depression, as if this were […]

a categorical difference? a speculation…

( OPINION )

Neuroskeptic‘s blog on Discover is one my favorites. His current post is about Diederik Stapel, the Dutch Social Psychologist, now famous as an admitted fraud who fabricated a lot of data. Diedrik actually became a regular on another favorite blog, Ivan Oranski’s Retraction Watch [Diederik has 54 Retractions to date]. If you don’t know the […]

back on track…

( OPINION )

With the Institute of Medicine [Sharing Clinical Trial Data: Maximizing Benefits, Minimizing Risk] and the National Institute of Health [Honoring Our Promise: Clinical Trial Data Sharing] joining the call for Data Transparency, we’re beginning to approach the details, wherein dwells the devil – what data? which trials? The whole notion of proprietary ownership of the […]

two chances to be a blip

( OPINION )

It looks as if the idea of Data Transparency has finally become mainstream. Pharmalot is reporting on the report from the Institute of Medicine [Sharing Clinical Trial Data: Maximizing Benefits, Minimizing Risk]. Johnson & Johnson has signed on to the Yoda Project at Yale [Johnson & Johnson Will Make Clinical Data Available to Outside Researchers]. […]