Friday, February 26, 2010

Major Depressive Disorder

Perlis, Iosifescu et al,,

Discussed the artifact that definitionally happens in clinical trials of assigning individuals to responder and non-responder categories when in fact the data always shows that the vast majority of individuals are oscillating in the spectrum in between. So unlike 8 week trial studies of antidepressants where there has to be an assignment of response vs no-response, these dense clinical data call for the application of other metrics such as proportion of days feeling "well." Unfortunately, such quality-of-life metrics don't go particularly well with many reviewers.

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