For primary prevention of stroke and heart attack people often expect more of statins than they get doi.org/10.1001/jama...

💬 Editorial: Statin guidelines and patient preferences for #ASCVD prevention often misalign, supporting the need for clearer risk communication and shared decision-making in clinical practice. ja.ma/4eBIEX0

Thanks, Christian. Still get 403: Forbidden. Probably they do not allow access from outside the US.

Some evidence of decreasing depression rates among adolescents from the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. 60% of teens with depression reported receiving mental health treatment (31% taking meds) www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/d...

It appears that regulatory agencies are pretty ignorant of predictive/diagnostic modeling. A very similar thing happened with the Japanese PMDA.

But that is how education goes. We don’t have as many RCTs of educational methods, do we?

After 40 years of working as psychiatrist and researcher, I cannot answer this question.

Can I just propose a sensitivity analysis called ‘excluding studies where researchers did not due their due diligence in fabricating the data”? Obvious fakes excluded?

日本のBlueskyユーザーの皆さん、こんにちは！👋 英語以外の言語として初の、日本語公式アカウントを開設しました。 今後、 @bsky.app などの投稿の翻訳、日本向けの告知などを行っていく予定です。 ぜひこの投稿をリポストして、多くの方にこのアカウントを知っていただけるようご協力ください。

Parents Circle Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize parentscirclefriends.org/parents-circ...

a webinar with bereaved Palestinian and Israeli peace builders -- parentscirclefriends.org/futureispeac...

This was a most illogical contrast one could ask. A clinician treats Mr A, and is interested in how they change over time. So a within-person change. But in deciding how to treat Mr A, the clinician must contrast Mr A receiving treatment X and not receiving it. Because we cannot do this (continue)

It’s just another completely wrong use of the term statistical significant, don’t you think?

I think they are even worse than that. They showed that sex is a prognostic factor. But they don't understand that prognostic factors essentially have no place in precision psychiatry. Precision psychiatry is about treatment*covariate interactions, i.e. about effect modifiers or HTE.

Most statin-eligible adults in the US and Japan desire greater absolute risk reduction than current statin efficacy provides before initiating therapy for #ASCVD prevention. ja.ma/4kDy02Y

💬 Editorial: Statin guidelines and patient preferences for #ASCVD prevention often misalign, supporting the need for clearer risk communication and shared decision-making in clinical practice. ja.ma/4rKRFAo

Today we published a survey of the SWD (smallest worthwhile difference) of statins, which found that the median SWDs exceeded its actual efficacy across all risk scenarios, suggesting that laypeople demand greater benefits than statins typically provide. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

In the shortest, use SMD, supplemented by CER/EER (control event rate & experimental event rate) for interpretability. mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1...

Is this SMD or MD?

Indeed, who with a sane/scientific mind can claim an effect size > 1.0? The readers, and the authors, should think twice.

Perhaps an article of interest from our team: J Clin Epidemiol, 2022 vol. 150 pp. 90-97 Retracted randomized controlled trials were cited and not corrected in systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35779...

A Taylor & Francis journal has retracted a widely-read paper linking cardiac-related mortality to COVID-19 vaccines after an unsuccessful legal attempt by the lead author to block the withdrawal. That author says he is considering further legal action against the publisher.

Relaxation was found, once again and again, to be harmful. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... as in acute treatment www.thelancet.com/journals/lan..., as in insomnia treatment jamanetwork.com/journals/jam..., as in panic disorder www.cambridge.org/core/journal..., and a few more coming.

Component NMA of depression prevention trials find that efficacious interventions can include problem-solving and behavioral activation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Congratulations and thank-you, @ploederl.bsky.social. It is unfortunate that we need more of these but it is the sad state of affairs in the current science publications.

Davos starts today. But it’s been seven years since Rutger Bregman said everything that needed saying… and the rich and powerful are still pretending like they haven’t heard a thing.

Last call for abstracts! Present your research at the WCCBT World Congress alongside 25+ keynote presentations. Register now, submit to the Call for Abstracts and be part of the future of #CBT. See you in San Francisco! wccbt2026.org #WorldCongress26 #SanFrancisco #WCCBT #ABCT

This is no joke. This is exactly what we might see in 10 years or in 20 years.

Funding Justice for Two Deported American Activists NIF is funding the legal appeal for two American Jewish women who were detained, deported, and banned from the country after working with Palestinian farmers. 　www.nif.org/stories/huma...

Facing Down Intimidation in Ben Gurion Airport Zak Witus, NIF’s Director of Young Leadership and Education, reflects on the experience of being detained in Ben Gurion airport in a piece published in the Forward.　forward.com/opinion/7870...

I am not too sure of that, Ioana. There are two potential problems here. First the questionable validity of the autism diagnosis. No AI can fix that, probably. Two this questionable diagnosis is sloppily applied in the real world. Maybe the ML algorithm can rectify this to a certain degree.

Our smartphone CBT app, called the Resilience Training App, is the first (as far as we know) to show efficacy among people with no to minimal depressive symptoms. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Agree. If only we could put ourselves in someone else’s shoes from the start. But better late than never.

Thanks, Martin. This is how MIC and SWD can be connected (but never equated). -- Furukawa TA (2014) How can we make the results of trials and their meta-analyses using continuous outcomes clinically interpretable? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 130, 321-323. 10.1111/acps.12278

Dear Mental Elf, As far as I know, SPARX has never been shown to be better than a control condition in a properly randomized trial, or has it? Happy to be rebutted.

And the distribution of SWD for psychotherapies for depression was very similar. In other words, we must say that there was no clear winner in terms of the population preferences -- or if you are brave enough or cynical enough, we must say there were only losers.

The average SWD for antidepressants for MDD was RD of 20%, and SMD of around 0.5. mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1...

Both are very good points. In the two SWD studies (for antidepressants and psychotherapies), we probably provided more information than is routinely provided yet not fully detailed. Alas! we do not know the exact frequencies at the population level, let alone at the individual level.

Good question. SWD and MIC (MID or MCID) are *completely* different. SWD is a between-group difference, typically between treatment and control, and in balance with the downsides of the treatment. MIC is a within-group pre-post change, typically in the absence of significant treatment burdens.

And abandon your pro-drug or anti-drug ideology and focus on what individual patients actually want.

What does this mean? The authors conclude, "Individual patient value judgements and preferences merit greater attention." Trite but always to be respected.

The SWD (smallest worthwhile difference), a.k.a. SWE (smallest worthwhile effect), represents the smallest benefits of an intervention that patients deem worthwhile given the burdens of the intervention. It is conceptually and numerically distinct from the MIC (a.k.a. MID, MCID).

The SWD (smallest worthwhile difference) for psychotherapies for depression was just about the same as that for antidepressants and only one in three people would be happy to initiate psychotherapies. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

An Elsevier journal has retracted a study on the placebo effect coauthored by a researcher known for extreme claims that have failed to withstand scrutiny. The move comes after critics said the researchers misunderstood “what a ‘treatment effect’ is.”