Reader Comments

Post a new comment on this article

Parallel discussion going on at BMJ.com

Posted by plosmedicine on 31 Mar 2009 at 00:23 GMT

Author: Erick Turner
Position: Assistant Professor
Institution: Oregon Health & Science University
E-mail: turner@ohsu.edu
Submitted Date: March 14, 2008
Published Date: March 17, 2008
This comment was originally posted as a “Reader Response” on the publication date indicated above. All Reader Responses are now available as comments.

For readers who are not aware of this, I would like to point out that the article by Kirsch, et. al. has also been the subject of some discussion in the BMJ.
At

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/co...

you will find an editorial by Robert Rosenthal, PhD and me regarding this article and a number of rapid responses to the editorial.

Competing interests declared: I am the lead author of the editorial in the BMJ to which I am drawing attention with this response. I am also the lead author of a study published Jan 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine that also used FDA review documents to examine the efficacy of antidepressants (and quantify publication bias). How our conclusions differed from those of Kirsch, et. al. is largely the subject of that editorial.

In addition, from 1998 to 2001, I served as a medical reviewer at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Subsequently, but ending in 2005, I provided outside consulting to Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline. From 2004 to 2005, I was on the speaker's bureaus of Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.