This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Psychiatry  • Depression  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Dr Wagner and colleagues¹ reported that sertraline was more effective than placebo for treating children with major depressive disorder and that it had few adverse effects. As one of the study group investigators in this trial, I am concerned about the way the authors pooled the data from 2 trials, a concern that was raised by previous letters critiquing this study.^2-4 The pooled data from these 2 trials found a statistically marginal effect of medication that seems unlikely to be clinically meaningful in terms of risk and benefit balance.

New information about these trials has since become available. The recent review of pediatric antidepressant trials by a British regulatory agency includes the separate analysis of these 2 trials.⁵ This analysis found that the 2 individual trials, each of a good size (almost 190 patients), did not demonstrate the effectiveness of sertraline in treating major depressive disorder in . . . [Full Text of this Article]

E. Jane Garland, MD, FRCPC
Department of Psychiatry
University of British Columbia
Vancouver

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Sertraline and Depression in Children—Reply
Karen Dineen Wagner, Christopher J. Wohlberg, and Ruoyong Yang
JAMA. 2004;291(13):1561-1562.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Efficacy of Sertraline in the Treatment of Children and Adolescents With Major Depressive Disorder: Two Randomized Controlled Trials
Karen Dineen Wagner, Paul Ambrosini, Moira Rynn, Christopher Wohlberg, Ruoyong Yang, Michael S. Greenbaum, Ann Childress, Craig Donnelly, and Deborah Deas
JAMA. 2003;290(8):1033-1041.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT