This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Psychiatry  • 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 Brown and colleagues¹ studied the effectiveness of cognitive therapy for the prevention of suicide attempts. This randomized controlled trial appears to show a benefit to introducing cognitive therapy in these patients. Randomization will on average create comparable groups at baseline, but it is possible that bias could have occurred at a later point in the intervention because the study was not blinded.²

One area of concern is the number of participants who received no treatment in the usual care group, which is significantly higher than the number who did not receive treatment in the cognitive therapy group throughout the first 6 months. Lack of any treatment could be the underlying explanation for the observed difference between the 2 groups. Most of the divergence in the survival curves occurs in the first 6 months of treatment when the proportional difference in absence of treatment between the groups . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Kristian B. Filion, BSc
Centre for Clinical Epidemiology & Community Studies
Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital
Montreal, Quebec

J. A. C. Delaney, MA, MSc
chris.delaney@clinepi.mcgill.ca
Division of Clinical Epidemiology
Royal Victoria Hospital
Montreal, Quebec

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

RELATED ARTICLES

Cognitive Therapy and Preventing Suicide Attempts
Martin Tepper and Jeff Whitehead
JAMA. 2005;294(22):2847.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Cognitive Therapy and Preventing Suicide Attempts—Reply
Gregory K. Brown, Thomas Ten Have, Gregg R. Henriques, Sharon X. Xie, Judd E. Hollander, and Aaron T. Beck
JAMA. 2005;294(22):2848.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Cognitive Therapy for the Prevention of Suicide Attempts: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Gregory K. Brown, Thomas Ten Have, Gregg R. Henriques, Sharon X. Xie, Judd E. Hollander, and Aaron T. Beck
JAMA. 2005;294(5):563-570.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT