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Primary care practitioners provide more than half the treatment for depression in the U.S. Many antidepressant drugs are available, but evidence about their relative efficacy and acceptability has been inconsistent.
Without external funding, multinational investigators reviewed 117 randomized controlled trials (involving nearly 26,000 patients with acute major depression) in which at least 2 of 12 “new-generation” antidepressants were compared head-to-head. Using “multiple-treatments meta-analysis,” the investigators compared the efficacy and acceptability of drugs not only from direct head-to-head results but also from separate trials against common comparators; the principal outcomes were response and dropout rates in the first 6 to 12 wee…