In an article titled “What You Really Need to Know About Antidepressants,” the New York Times repeats, yet again, the fraudulent results from the STAR*D trial. The article, with a subhead that promises readers “Facts and common misconceptions about some of America’s most widely used drugs,” informs readers the following:
“The largest study of multiple antidepressants — nicknamed the STAR*D trial — found that half of the participants had improved after using either the first or second medication that they tried, and nearly 70 percent of people had become symptom-free by the fourth antidepressant.”
That was the result publicized by the STAR*D investigators in their 2006 report on the study outcomes. However, as Ed Pigott and colleagues have reported, in publications dating back to 2010, the investigators violated their own protocol in numerous ways to inflate the remission rate. This past August, they published a patient-level reanalysis, in BMJ Open, that found that if the STAR*D investigators had adhered to their protocol, the true remission rate at the end of four stages was 35%.
Pigott and the authors of the study have contacted the New York Times multiple times since then, asking that the paper inform the public of this fact. Instead, the paper, with this latest article on “facts” about “some of America’s mostly widely used drugs,” once again informs its readers of the fraudulent result.
