what they said (Hover the mouse cursor over underlined words for more info)

LONDON -- Doctors have long assumed that most antidepressants are interchangeable.

But according to a new study, Zoloft and Cipralex work slightly better than 10 other popular drugs, and should be psychiatrists' first choice for patients with moderate to severe depression.

Previous research found few differences between antidepressants. A U.S. government study in 2006 concluded that patients with major depression did equally well on different drugs....

The original article can be found at: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090128/anti_depressants_090128/20090128?hub=Health&s_name

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what we said (Hover the mouse cursor over underlined words for more info)

This is a fair article that examines a meta-analysis of drug studies for depression. Despite some good elements, the main problem with this study is its unclear evidence. The article ranks the effectiveness of a handful of antidepressant treatments based "benefits, side-effects and cost". Beyond this, the reader is left virtually uninformed of how the treatment differences might have been quantified and how much the treatments varied (i.e. the magnitude of the difference).

It is important to note that one of the large and recent problems with antidepressant studies has been the extent to which negative trials are buried. In this study we are not aware of what types of article were included in the meta-analysis and have no idea if the authors made the effort to find unpublished literature on the drugs in question.

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