A blog about the intersection of medicine and business, produced by the members of the Medical Consumerism seminar at the University of Minnesota.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
CAFE study author replies
Jeffrey Lieberman, the principal investigator for the CAFE study in which Dan Markingson died, defends the questionable dosing choices in the study on the Carlat Psychiatry Blog. See Carlat's summary, plus comments by Dr. Bernard Carroll and me, here.
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
The first published reference to the CAFE study "Landmark Study Indicates Equivalent Effectiveness of Atypical Antipsychotics in the Treatment of First-Episode Psychosis" from exotic VIENNA, AUSTRIA, and the 8th World Congress of Biological Psychiatry. What a headline. We should now have treating clinicians world wide knowing exactly what to do and how to treat first episode psychosis. Five years later, that headline means nothing. The headline was designed strictly to enhance AstraZeneca's Seroquel. Carl Elliott's article in Mother Jones is an exceptional piece of investigative research and fact checking and delivered accurate and truthful manner. These drugs had been on the market already for years, are we to believe that clinicians had no clue on how to use or dose them!! In an era of conflict-of-interest, does anyone else not see a real problem with the fact that the very same investigators were doing basically the same trials between CATIE and CAFE, only being paid more from AstraZeneca. Zeneca only commissioned the CAFE study because they knew they would take a beating if the CATIE results held true. With CAFE they could at least control those bragging rights. As for Lieberman and McEvoy, lead investigators in CAFE, the definition of insanity applies. Doing something over and over again the same way but expecting different results. They are paid to perform and produce results, and poor results don't exactly put you first in line at the bank.
Perhaps the IRB at the University of Minnesota should do the right thing and make it mandatory that all Principal Investigators in psychiatric clinical trials have to take the same study medication along with the human subjects, just for scientific purposes of course, most have a diagnosis to fit most of the studies anyway.
2 comments:
The first published reference to the CAFE study "Landmark Study Indicates Equivalent Effectiveness of Atypical Antipsychotics in the Treatment of First-Episode Psychosis" from exotic VIENNA, AUSTRIA, and the 8th World Congress of Biological Psychiatry. What a headline. We should now have treating clinicians world wide knowing exactly what to do and how to treat first episode psychosis. Five years later, that headline means nothing. The headline was designed strictly to enhance AstraZeneca's Seroquel. Carl Elliott's article in Mother Jones is an exceptional piece of investigative research and fact checking and delivered accurate and truthful manner. These drugs had been on the market already for years, are we to believe that clinicians had no clue on how to use or dose them!! In an era of conflict-of-interest, does anyone else not see a real problem with the fact that the very same investigators were doing basically the same trials between CATIE and CAFE, only being paid more from AstraZeneca. Zeneca only commissioned the CAFE study because they knew they would take a beating if the CATIE results held true. With CAFE they could at least control those bragging rights. As for Lieberman and McEvoy, lead investigators in CAFE, the definition of insanity applies. Doing something over and over again the same way but expecting different results. They are paid to perform and produce results, and poor results don't exactly put you first in line at the bank.
Perhaps the IRB at the University of Minnesota should do the right thing and make it mandatory that all Principal Investigators in psychiatric clinical trials have to take the same study medication along with the human subjects, just for scientific purposes of course, most have a diagnosis to fit most of the studies anyway.
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