Methodological guidelines for reading drug-evaluation research

Clinical trials in psychiatry: background and statistical perspective

There have been many hundreds of studies which have examined the efficacy of different forms of treatment of psychiatric disorders over the past 40 years. This paper presents some background to these studies for statisticians, illustrating and discussing some of the difficult problems which arise in this specialty of medicine. It also demonstrates a major requirement for statisticians to influence both the design and presentation of clinical trials and provides some suggestions about how this may be done.

Clinical and demographic characteristics of voluntary and involuntary psychiatric inpatients

Voluntary and involuntary psychiatric inpatients were compared on demographic, social and clinical characteristics. Chi-squared tests of independence revealed significant differences in age and financial support based on status at admission. No significant differences were found with respect to diagnostic category. It was concluded that demographic, social and clinical characteristics do not clearly discriminate between voluntary and involuntary inpatients.

Appraising the quality of drug-evaluation research: I. A method of meta-analysis for acute treatment medications

The present paper focuses on drug-evaluation research, and describes a method of meta-analysis for evaluating the methodological quality of a body of research focusing on the study of an acute treatment medication. An illustrative application of this procedure to research evaluating lithium treatment for acute mania revealed general problems with diagnostic reliability and the reliability of the dependent variable, and a tendency to ignore the statistical power aspects of determining sample size. The implications of this are discussed in terms of a need to further clarify lithium's role in treating this disorder.