I published a new paper in the Journal of Affective Disorders entitled “The 52 symptoms of major depression: Lack of content overlap among seven common depression scales” (PDF). The paper examines content overlap of 7 common depression scales, and concludes that the scales feature 52 distinct depression symptoms that are listed in the main Figure… Read more »
After reviewing the paper “The relative responsiveness of test instruments can be estimated using a meta-analytic approach: an illustration with treatments for depression” by Kounali et al. 2016, the editor invited me to write a response because I raised the point that a large amount of researchers seem to misunderstand the concept of scale responsiveness…. Read more »
We have a new commentary in Molecular Psychiatry entitled “Problems with latent class analysis to detect data-driven subtypes of depression” (PDF; together with the fantastic Hanna van Loo, Rob Wanders & Klaas Wardenaar). This was a response to numerous papers over the last years that found separate latent classes in depression that may be statistical… Read more »
We have a new network paper out in Psychological Medicine entitled “Network Analysis of Depression and Anxiety Symptom Relations in a Psychiatric Sample” (PDF). I tend to think of the paper as a state-of-the-art replication of the great comorbidity paper by Cramer et al. 2010 who investigated the comorbidity of depression and generalized anxiety disorder…. Read more »
I am very happy to announce that Cherie Armour and me are organizing a special issue for the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, together with the editor-in-chief Miranda Olff. In summary, we are looking for papers on: PTSD symptom networks, either on the level of groups or individuals, in cross-sectional or time-series data The stability of… Read more »
Imagine you are a group of scientists and want to find out whether a novel drug X works on a specific problem Y. You run the following study: You enroll a small sample of 14 participants who have the problem Y. You give these 14 participants your novel drug, but you do not enroll a… Read more »
(Series: critical commentaries on depression trials. Prior posts: 1, 2, 3, 4) Antidepressants only marginally outperform placebos (Khan & Brown, 2015) – which has led to a number of novel strategies to try to improve treatment for patients suffering from depressive disorders. Adjunctive Nutraceuticals present one such strategy: providing patients with specific forms of dietary… Read more »
A few months back, a study was published in JAMA Psychiatry claiming that whole-body hyperthermia is an effective treatment for depression (UPDATE: the paper was published in full now on August 6th 2016, some time after the online first print). For those who don’t know psychiatric journals very well, JAMA Psychiatry is currently ranked highest… Read more »
Dr. Fava and colleagues have published an antidepressant trial on adjunctive Brexpiprazole, a novel atypical antipsychotic drug that was developed to treat schizophrenia, in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. The trial consisted of 4 steps: The authors carefully selected 50 patients who had not shown improvements with their current antidepressant. These patients received 2 more… Read more »
Unpublished commentary. PDF, DOI 10.13140/RG.2.1.5149.7362. By: Eiko I. Fried, University of Leuven, Belgium Lauren M. Bylsma, University of Pittsburgh, USA Randolph M. Nesse, Arizona State University, USA After submitting the commentary to Clinical Psych Science, the Editor wrote us that they generally do not publish commentaries, despite the website stating they do. Unfortunate … we’ll… Read more »
I recently stumbled across the paper “A metastructural model of mental disorders and pathological personality traits”, authored by Aidan Wright and Leonard Simms in 2015. I enjoyed reading it: it’s a strong methodological paper, using state-of-the-art exploratory structural equation models (ESEM). It would have been a pleasure for me to review this paper: a very… Read more »
Dr Payne, director of the Women’s Mood Disorders Center and an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, has written a commentary on the website of the American Psychiatric Association entitled “Yes or No: Prescribing Antidepressants to Pregnant Patients”. Her main argument is summarized in the abstract of the article:
We published a new study in Psychological Assessment a few days ago, and I would like to take the time to explain what these results imply. You can find the full text here. Let me summarize the findings first. We examined 2 crucial psychometric assumptions that are part of nearly all contemporary depression research. We… Read more »
On December 15th, Molecular Psychiatry published our commentary “The volumes of subcortical regions in depressed and healthy individuals are strikingly similar: a reinterpretation of the results by Schmaal et al”. You can find the full text PDF in the above link if you have a subscription to the journal, otherwise see the project’s open science… Read more »
Halaris and colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in which they studied the impact of the SSRI antidepressant escitalopram (ESC) in a group of 30 depressed patients. Only 20 participants completed the trial, and there was no placebo group. The authors tracked the level of a number of inflammatory markers and… Read more »