Posted by Bill L on February 28, 2002, at 8:50:00
In reply to Antidepressant drug trials, posted by Anyuser on February 28, 2002, at 8:01:20
You have a very good point! I guess it's just a matter of cost and statistics. Clinical trials are very expensive. Statistically, I guess you figure that a couple of hundred people per trial is "statistically significant".
The other short coming of clinical trials is that each trial only lasts for a very brief period of time such as 6 to 8 weeks. Many people have a different experience with a drug after a year or so then they did after their first 6 weeks on the drug.
> Here is a link to an interesting article about antidepressant drug trials: http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2001-02/01-091.html
>
> I am continually surprised by how little hard-core science it takes to get a drug approved, and how few people are tested. The number of patients who have taken Celexa, for example, since it was introduced in Europe and then in the US measures in the tens of millions. The number of patients tested in drug trials for Celexa measures in the very low thousands. If you are treated by family physician with, say, a decade of experience treating patients with a particular antidepressant in a clinical setting, that single doctor has probably seen a greater number of depressed patients on that drug, in absolute terms, than all of the patients tested for that drug during trials.
poster:Bill L
thread:95801
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020222/msgs/95813.html