Posted by dr. dave on August 23, 2002, at 3:59:39
In reply to Re: Lexapro clinical data » moxy1000, posted by pharmrep on August 22, 2002, at 20:25:46
The chief study on Lexapro v. Celexa is that by Gorman, and is a meta-analysis of three 8-week studies comparing Lexapro, Celexa and placebo. It is available in poster form at
http://www.cipralex.ch/pdf/poster/gorm521_501.pdf
and in its full form at
http://www.cipralex.ch/pdf/literatur/gorman.pdfHave a look at the end-point results when drop-outs have been taken into account - on the poster Cipralex is more effective than Lexapro by a tiny amount, in the printed paper it's the other way round. Same study, same graph. Go figure, as I understand you say on your side of the Atlantic.
There are also papers galore at
http://www.cipralex.ch/f/poster.htmlIt gets a bit overwhelming but here's what research there is
- lots of preclinical studies
- three 8-week studies comparing Celexa, Lexapro and placebo only two of which are available (Burke et al and Lepola et al, despite me having asked Lundbeck specifically for the third)
- a meta-analysis of these three (Gorman)
- a study comparing Lexapro and placebo alone
- a longer term study which again does not seem to be available for scrutinyAll of these papers have been produced by Lundbeck/Forest. You may think that as they are 'scientific papers' they could not be biased or misleading. You may think otherwise.
It is worth noting studies which show that research on the same topics published by those with conflicts of interest consistently come to different conclusions than those published by independent authors (British Medical Journal - I don't have the reference to hand but will supply it later)
poster:dr. dave
thread:109458
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020821/msgs/117477.html