Friday, 7 January 2011  Antidepressants have no more than a
minor effect in Minor Depression  Neuroskeptic reports on
another paper that: "...has added to the growing ranks of
studies finding that antidepressant drugs don't work in people
with milder forms of depression" The study looked at 'Minor
Depression', which is a DSM diagnosis that is similar to 'Major
Depression' except that patients only have 2-4 rather than the 5
or more depressive symptoms necessary for the latter diagnosis.
Neuroskeptic reproduces the 'response rate' figure which shows
no significant effect of antidepressants in this diagnosis but I
think the findings from the continuous outcomes are more
informative:  This shows the 3 studies that reported continuous
outcomes (mean HRSD score) looking at paroxetine in nursing home
residents, fluoxetine, and amitriptyline respectively. The
effect size is a small* -0.93 HRSD points (95% CI: -2.27-0.41)
and not statistically significant**. However, there are only
about 200 patients included (which