Betta Fish Flaring
This is Toki, my Cambodian Wonderful Delta Tail Betta. He doesn't seem to like the camera very much. He is in a 10 gallon vehement/filtered tank and ...
Simple solutions can reduce medication errors
More than 1.5 million Americans a year savoir vivre preventable drug-induced injuries, says a Purdue University vigour sciences expert. " ...
"Simply Raw: Raw for 30 Days" Trailer (Reversing Diabetes in 30 ...
"Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days" is an unrelated documentary film that chronicles six Americans with diabetes who divert to ...
Log base 2: Upping the anti (depressant)
The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the FDA ... They then used meta-analytic techniques to investigate whether the initial severity of depression affected the HRSD [Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression] improvement scores for the drug and placebo groups in these trials. They confirmed first that the overall effect of these new generation of antidepressants was below the recommended criteria for clinical significance. Then they showed that there was virtually no difference in the improvement scores for drug and placebo in patients with moderate depression and only a small and clinically insignificant difference among patients with very severe depression. The difference in improvement between the antidepressant and placebo reached clinical significance, however, in patients with initial HRSD scores of more than 28—that is, in the most severely depressed patients. Additional analyses indicated that the apparent clinical effectiveness of the antidepressants among these most severely depressed patients reflected a decreased responsiveness to placebo rather than an increased responsiveness to antidepressants. First, look at the vertical axis, labeled "Improvement (d)" and ranging from 0 to 2. This is the mean improvement in the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), but it has been divided by the standard deviation. Why divide it by the standard deviation? Well this is what you might do if each study was using a different rating scale, in order to standardize things. But here it's not necessary. Each study used the HRSD, so it would be better not to standardize. Second, if triangles represent antidepressant results and circles represent placebo results from the studies, how do they pair up? Each study has two "arms": an antidepressant arm and a placebo arm, but on the figure you can't tell which triangle belongs with which circle. This points to an important problem: the authors meta-analyzed the antidepressant arms separately...