Our new letter with @IoanaA_Cristea @EikoFried Lisa Cosgrove and Alain Braillon: a 🧶. Last year the @TheLancet published a paper about Novel and Emerging Treatments for major Depression. This paper rather addresses "treatment resistant depression" (TRD) thelancet.com/article/S0140-… First, the concept of TRD does not have reliable criteria for research and is conceptually empty. The key question remains whether the disorder is resistant to treatment, or whether treatments are less effective.

thelancet.com/journals/lanps…

New comment is out @NatureMedicine: "Implementing clinical trial data sharing requires training a new generation of biomedical researchers". Unfortunately it is under a paywall (... we will find a solution hopefully...). But here is a 🧶.

nature.com/articles/s4159… First, no need to unroll this 🧶 as this blog post summarizes it.

reither.org/post/a-trainin…

Happy new year to all meta-researchers! 2022 was a busy year. It was the end of the @ReiTheR_RCT projet (@AgenceRecherche). We did a lot of meta-research, and tried to communicate as best as possible about it. Please retweet this 🧶

reither.org Data sharing and reproducibility was the core activity of our project. We published a registered report about the main studies assessed by the European Medicines Agency.

bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

🚨🚨🚨 Evidence Based Medicine, acupuncture, overlapping meta-analyses, Vibration of effect: new paper in press @JClinEpi. A 🧶

"A multiverse analysis of meta-analyses assessing acupuncture efficacy for smoking cessation evidenced vibration of effects"

jclinepi.com/article/S0895-… This paper is the third one in a series of case study exploring vibration of effects in meta-analyses. Vibration of effets corresponds to the variability of results obtained with different analytical choices.

🧶New paper: "Vibration of effect in > than 16 000 pooled analyses of individual participant data from 12 RCTs comparing canagliflozin and placebo for type 2 diabetes mellitus" out in @BMJMedicine, with H. Gouraud @JoshuaDWallach @jsross119 @BoussageonR.
bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/1/1/e0… Pooled analyses (ie, non-exhaustive quantitative syntheses that pool individual participant data from several independent RCTs exploring similar research questions) are frequently used in the evaluation of new treatments, and can influence day-to-day clinical practice.

🧶🧶 Our modest attempt to win the best letter title award {A Mirror-Image Trial or Smoke and Mirrors? Phase 3b Study on Digital Aripiprazole} with André Gillibert, Barbara Mintzes, Alain Braillon, and Lisa Cosgrove is now out in J Clin Psychiatry.

psychiatrist.com/jcp/assessment… In this small letter we provide our analysis of a study published in this journal.

psychiatrist.com/jcp/schizophre…

[let's go on]. First, there is a wide debate on the minimal clinically relevant differences on depression scales. ebm.bmj.com/content/27/2/6… And, honestly this debate is complex, e.g. in terms of effect sizes: jclinepi.com/article/S0895-…

Antidepressant efficacy: A tale of X+ meta-analysis
A survival kit in > 400 meta-analyses world.

("Antidepressive Agents"[Mesh]) AND "Depressive Disorder, Major"[Mesh] + filter "meta-analysis" Focus on exhaustive meta-analyses regarding study selection. This meta-analysis -available since 2009 thanks to @eturnermd1- demonstrated that publication bias inflated antidepressant efficacy.

nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NE…

Read our comment about the Sputnik V vaccine. thelancet.com/journals/lance…. Our international group (Enrico Bucci (@bad_scientists), Johannes Berkhof, André Gillibert, Gowri Gopalakrishna (@gowrigopala), Raffaele A Calogero, Lex M Bouter (@LexBouter), Konstantin Andreev, Florian Naudet, Vasiliy Vlassov have some concerns about reporting of this trial.

Many researchers want to share their clinical trial data but don’t know how to do it. We are now starting to work on this in the French context and hope that we will be able to provide simple solutions. More information here: ouvrirlascience.fr/clinical-trial… This is part of the French Plan « Ouvrir la science » : ouvrirlascience.fr/open-science/

A commentary on the publication of preliminary results of the Sputnik-V vaccine phase 3 trial | Russian Society for Evidence Based Medicine osdm.org/english/2021/0… In a few words, major concerns for the phase1/2 trial. google.fr/amp/s/cattivis…

Thead. With L Cosgrove, G Hogberg, @Info_Mastery, @IoanaA_Cristea, we are concerned that the hypes surrounding treatment-resistant depression and its reconceptualization (i.e. difficult-to-treat depression) could be a new case of diagnosis creep.
thelancet.com/journals/lanps… Diagnosis creep is the process in which expert panels decide to extend definition of an existing disease. To avoid such a trap there are some guidances, for instance this one by @PaulGlasziou:
jamanetwork.com/journals/jamai…

Just in case it interest, little thread about overlapping meta-analysis (very relevant today). The story starts with a first meta-analysis about nalmefene. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/a… The conclusion reads: The value of nalmefene for treatment of alcohol addiction is not established. At best, nalmefene has limited efficacy in reducing alcohol consumption.

Some thoughts about conflict of interests in medicine. Let's imagine two drugs. Drug A is promoted by a pharmaceutical firm and received an approval based on a subgroup analysis of a subgroup of trials. Drug B is a repurposed drug with almost no evidence at all. Manufacturer of drug A provides funding for a consensus meeting with all the "Key Opinion Leaders". This meeting will try to see wether drug A or B should be used in day to day clinical practice.

bmj.com/content/336/76…

Today, @UnivParisSaclay is proud to have reach a good rank (14th) in Shanghaï ranking. This is surely an important achievement for those who trust metrics as a good evaluation tool. For those who think that integrity also matters, yesterday, one of its member, Pr Perronne @uvsq, had two papers retracted. @UnivParisSaclay and @UVSQ_Research, a high rank university should think about this very seriously.

Please take the time to read the following thread and please retweet as it deserves coverage. It is about Artemisia and two very "interesting" (or should I say problematic) studies. Well, read this paper :Artemisia annua and Artemisia afra tea infusions vs. artesunate-amodiaquine (ASAQ) in treating Plasmodium falciparum malaria in a large scale, double blind, randomized clinical trial. Munyangi J, et al. Phytomedicine. 2019 doi: 10.1016/j.phymed.2018.12.002.