caa a22 4500 469121742 CHVBK 20180323133141.0 cr unu---uuuuu 170328e19920201xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/BF02246244 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/BF02246244 Quitkin F. Office of Mental Health, New York State Psychiatric Institute, 722 West 168th Street, 10032, New York, NY, USA aut Methodology of measuring the efficacy of antidepressants [Elektronische Daten] [F. Quitkin] Evaluation of the efficacy of antidepressant agents needs to take into account factors which increase the "effect size”, such as dosage, treatment duration, the use of two-phase trials, and pattern analysis of responders. Although many patients are thought to receive inadequate doses of antidepressants, relatively few dose-response studies have been performed. However, trials of both tricyclic antidepressants and phenelzine have shown that statistically significant improvements in outcome result from the use of higher dosages; the length of treatment may also affect results. In some studies, the proportion of patients showing a clear-cut response increased significantly among patients treated with active drug instead of placebo when the treatment period was extended from 4 to 6 weeks, independent of the dose used. There may thus be a distinct advantage in extending trials of antidepressants for a minimum of 6 weeks. Two-phase drug trials can be used to extend the trial period still further in responding patients, to emphasise the contrast between treatment and placebo effects and to eliminate type-2 errors. Twelve-week trials might increase the statistical power of the evaluation by 10-20%, in studies where the drug effect size is small. Pattern analysis of the timing and duration of patients' responses has been shown to aid the distinction of true responses from non-specific or placebo effects, and may be useful for evaluating data from studies of antidepressant agents which yield ambiguous results. Springer-Verlag, 1992 Antidepressant agents nationallicence Trial methodology nationallicence Pattern analysis nationallicence Two-phase trial design nationallicence Psychopharmacology Springer-Verlag 106(1992-02-01), S87-S89 0033-3158 106<S87 1992 106 213 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02246244 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02246244 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Quitkin F. Office of Mental Health, New York State Psychiatric Institute, 722 West 168th Street, 10032, New York, NY, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Psychopharmacology Springer-Verlag 106(1992-02-01), S87-S89 0033-3158 106<S87 1992 106 213 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer