Posted by Klavot on February 22, 2007, at 9:52:28
Hi all
Many people claim that modern antidepressants work only poorly - if at all - based on the apparently small margin between the efficacy of active and placebo compounds in many antidepressant drug trials. Now I'll come clean at the onset: I am not convinced that antidepressants don't work. I've seen the evidence for claiming that they don't work, but I'm just not convinced.
I've been thinking though, one of the problems with AD trials is that they generally do not employ a polypharmacological approach. They only test one drug at a time. In practice, psychiatrists tend to prescribe multiple drugs concomitantly. Do you think that if they were to do a trial on, say, Zoloft combined with Wellbutrin, or Remeron combined with Provigil, or Remeron combined with Effexor, etc., that the success margin between active and placebo arms of these trials might be substantially greater than the 10 - 20% that seems to be quite common in single-drug trials?
Klavot
poster:Klavot
thread:735061
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070219/msgs/735061.html