Well, I can’t seem to let this topic lie. After my last two posts, I ran across a letter to the editor in the American Journal of Psychiatry from Dr. Bernard Carroll, a frequent commenter here, written back in 2009 in response to the meta-analysis by Nelson and Popakostas [Atypical Antipsychotic Augmentation in Major Depressive […]
Continued from a worksheet post… In April 2015, the FDA approved a new Atypical Antipsychotic, Brexpiprazole [Rexulti®]. Around the same time, there were two articles about the Brexpiprazole clinical trials, both released on-line ahead of print in prominent journals [see the spice must flow…]. But there were some odd things about those articles. Each one […]
In the 1970s, no psychiatrist worth their salt couldn’t draw the NIMH Memorial Neuron and sketch in the receptors and re·uptake pathways. Back then, it was catecholamines, dopamine, but later came serotonin. I haven’t seen anybody do that for years. I guess people fled when confronted about the phrase chemical imbalance and other bio·hypotheses that […]
The topic here is augmentation with Atypical Antipsychotics in treatment resistant depression [once again], but it’s also about meta-analyses in general. In my recent in the land of sometimes[3]…, I was looking at the techniques used in making the forest plots now widely used in meta-analyses. It came to mind as I was comparing these […]
‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli arrested for securities fraud
The effect of regression to the mean in epidemiologic and clinical studies. by Davis CE. American Journal of Epidemiology. 1976 104[5]:493-498. "Regression to the mean is the phrase used to identify the phenomenon that a variable that is extreme on its first measurement will tend to be closer to the center of the distribution for […]
Clinical Outcome After Antipsychotic Treatment Discontinuation in Functionally Recovered First-Episode Nonaffective Psychosis Individuals: A 3-Year Naturalistic Follow-Up Study by Jacqueline Mayoral-van Son, MD; Victor Ortiz-Garcia de la Foz, VTE; Obdulia Martinez-Garcia, PhD; Teresa Moreno, MD; Maria Parrilla-Escobar, MD; Elsa M. Valdizan, MD, PhDc; and Benedicto Crespo-Facorro, MD, PhD Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Published online 12/08/2015 […]
The only way to have missed hearing about this study would be to have no contact with the media in the last 24 hours. Right now, Matt Lauer is in the other room waxing eloquent and it was the top story on my news and medical alerts this morning. Last night, the experts on the […]
Some more statistical fluff. I don’t know the story of how the meta-analyses [study of studies] came to be and how the methodology was developed, but I know about it from the Cochrane Collaborations. Wherever and however aside, it’s pretty spectacular from where I sit. Both the metrics used and the way they’re displayed has […]
This is just some fluff. After all this time looking at the industry-funded clinical trials [RCTs], I’ve learned a few tricks for spotting the mechanics of deceit being used, but I realize that I need to say a bit about the basic science of RCTs before attempting to catalog things to look for. Data Transparency […]