An article published last year the The New England Journal of Medicine reports that research on antidepressants has been biased in that contradictory findings have not been published. They claim that this "selective publication" of only research findings which support the efficacy of antidepressants has created a false impression in the medical community and the public of the effectiveness of antidepressants in the reduction of depression symptoms. This is a very serious charge.
Being evidence-based is the foundation of the scientific method. Ideally, the scientific method requires stringent peer review of all research claims and that all outcomes be published for review. If some studies are selectively not being published this thwarts the entire process and invalidates any claims made by the articles which are published. If the research upon which psychiatry makes its claims is biased or tainted, then their claims of practicing evidence-based medicine are false. It cannot be "evidence-based" practice if contradictory evidence is being suppressed. This is not science.
And what did the study find?
"Of the 74 FDA-registered studies in the analysis we could not find evidence of publication for 23 (31%)"
"The questions of whether the studies were published and, if so, how the results were reported were strongly related to their overall outcomes. The FDA deemed 38 of the 74 studies (51%) positive, and all but 1 of the 38 were published. The remaining 36 studies (49%) were deemed to be either negative (24 studies) or questionable (12). Of these 36 studies, 3 were published as not positive, whereas the remaining 33 either were not published (22 studies) or were published, in our opinion, as positive (11) and therefore conflicted with the FDA's conclusion. Overall, the studies that the FDA judged as positive were approximately 12 times as likely to be published in a way that agreed with the FDA analysis as were studies with nonpositive results according to the FDA..."
"We found a bias toward the publication of positive results. Not only were positive results more likely to be published, but studies that were not positive, in our opinion, were often published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome. We analyzed these data in terms of the proportion of positive studies and in terms of the effect size associated with drug treatment. Using both approaches, we found that the efficacy of this drug class is less than would be gleaned from an examination of the published literature alone. According to the published literature, the results of nearly all of the trials of antidepressants were positive. In contrast, FDA analysis of the trial data showed that roughly half of the trials had positive results. "
References:
Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy, de Jonge P., Bockting C. L., Schoones J. W., Ninan P. T., Poole R. M., Stiles G. L., Turner E. H., Tell R. A. Extract | Full Text | PDF N Engl J Med 2008; 358:2180-2182, May 15, 2008.
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