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Antidepressant Trials Could Be Misleading

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By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times

Published: January 17, 2008

The makers of antidepressants such as Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs' true effectiveness, a new analysis has found.

In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of patients on placebo pills. When the less-positive unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: The drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Previous research had found a similar bias toward reporting positive results for a variety of medications.

The new analysis, reviewing data from 74 trials involving 12 drugs, is the most thorough to date. It also documents a large difference: Although 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did.

In 2004, after revelations that negative findings from antidepressant trials had not been published, a group of leading journals agreed to stop publishing clinical trials that were not registered in a public database.

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