Post by catatonic on May 25, 2004 8:08:59 GMT -5
"Four popular antidepressants being used to treat thousands of depressed American children are unsafe, ineffective or both, according to the first comprehensive scientific review to include all available studies, including negative data that have long been withheld from public scrutiny by the pharmaceutical industry."
That's the opening paragraph from an interesting article in the Washington Post, based on a study in the British medical journal "Lancet". Lancet is their equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine...better now, I think, since NEJM has hired a former drug company executive as their editor and thereby probably flushed most of their objectivity down the old you-know-what.
Anyway, the article summarizes a meta-analysis of drug company trials, that was published in Lancet. This analysis included the trials that the drug companies ended up NOT publishing because they showed their medications in a less-than-favorable light. (This is a common trick, which makes it VERY hard to rely on published study results for an accurate picture of how a drug performs and what risks are associated with taking it.)
In fact, the Post article addresses that issue:
"Wayne D. Blackmon, a Washington psychiatrist who has long said clinicians cannot rely on the integrity of the data they are being given, said Congress should force the FDA to take unpublished negative trials into account and force the companies to make all data -- positive and negative -- available for public scrutiny."
What really bothers me about all this is...how can we make an informed decision about whether to medicate our children or which medication to use if we can't trust the information on drug safety and effectiveness and we can't trust our doctor's recommendation because he's relying on that same suspect information. Makes me VERY grateful we haven't had to go the medication route, because it seems so hard to accurately assess the risks and benefits.
Almost forgot...here's a link to the full article:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34792-2004Apr22.html
That's the opening paragraph from an interesting article in the Washington Post, based on a study in the British medical journal "Lancet". Lancet is their equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine...better now, I think, since NEJM has hired a former drug company executive as their editor and thereby probably flushed most of their objectivity down the old you-know-what.
Anyway, the article summarizes a meta-analysis of drug company trials, that was published in Lancet. This analysis included the trials that the drug companies ended up NOT publishing because they showed their medications in a less-than-favorable light. (This is a common trick, which makes it VERY hard to rely on published study results for an accurate picture of how a drug performs and what risks are associated with taking it.)
In fact, the Post article addresses that issue:
"Wayne D. Blackmon, a Washington psychiatrist who has long said clinicians cannot rely on the integrity of the data they are being given, said Congress should force the FDA to take unpublished negative trials into account and force the companies to make all data -- positive and negative -- available for public scrutiny."
What really bothers me about all this is...how can we make an informed decision about whether to medicate our children or which medication to use if we can't trust the information on drug safety and effectiveness and we can't trust our doctor's recommendation because he's relying on that same suspect information. Makes me VERY grateful we haven't had to go the medication route, because it seems so hard to accurately assess the risks and benefits.
Almost forgot...here's a link to the full article:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34792-2004Apr22.html
