LAUSR

Furukawa et al. (1) published an individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis hoping to add to the debate over whether the decidedly modest effects of antidepressants, relative to placebos, are absent in patients with milder forms of major depressive disorder (MDD) and instead more potent among those with more severe MDD. They fail to find any evidence of a severity-by-treatment–visit-by-treatment interaction in a sample of patients from six of eleven Japanese trials drawn from a systematic review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) exploring antidepressant efficacy. The authors acknowledged that the data are limited by the exclusion of patients with very severe MDD. Nonetheless, they go on to argue that the implication of their finding is that