The UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is "the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and tr

"The truth is rarely pure, and never simple"  Oscar Wilde

There has been a lot of media publicity about the article on the value of antidepressants by Irving Kirsch and colleagues which was published in PLoS Medicine last month (Kirsch, Deacon et al. 2008). The authors wrote "We obtained data on all clinical trials submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the licensing of the four new-generation antidepressants for which full datasets were available. We then used meta-analytic techniques to assess ... effects of initial severity on improvement scores for drug and placebo groups and on drug-placebo difference scores." The four antidepressants studied were fluoxetine, paroxetine, nefazodone and venlafaxine.

I wrote in a blog posting on February 12^th that Depersonalizati

There's a helpful editorial in last month's American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) - "Fruit and vegetables: think variety, go ahead, eat!" As with many journals, one doesn't have to pay anything to look at the full text of AJCN editorials. It's a good read. It comments on a paper in the journal by Myint et al showing a 42% reduction in stroke for those in the highest quartile - the top 25% - of plasma vitamin C compared with those in the lowest quartile (independently of other risk factors such as smoking, exercise, age, weight and so on).