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(Stroke. 2006;37:1365.)
© 2006 American Heart Association, Inc.

Letters to the Editor

Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Treatment for Patients With Poststroke Depression

Yan Chen, MPH, PhD, candidate Jeff J. Guo, PhD, Associate Professor

College of Pharmacy, University of Cincinnati Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

To the Editor:

Because of our pharmacoepidemiologic research focus, we reviewed the recent article by Hackett et al entitled "Management of depression after stroke" in the May 2005 issue of Stroke.¹ The article provided a critical systematic review of antidepressant therapies after stroke based on 7 treatment trials and 9 prevention trials. In Figure 2,¹ the authors compared the antidepressants with placebo in term of average change in depression scores between the baseline and end of treatment. Although there were considerable variations of depression measures as authors mentioned, we believe that it would be more meaningful to provide quantitative overall effectiveness comparisons by using meta-analysis method.^2,3 We retrieved and reviewed the original articles listed in Figure 2. It should be noted that, attributable to the predefined selection criteria in the Hackett et al study, the Robinson et al study⁴ should be included for both treatment and prevention trials because its crossover design did provide the comparisons of the depression scores in the depressed patients between the therapy group and control group. On the other hand, the Lipsey et al⁵ original article did not provide the detail data (the means and standard deviations at the baseline and end of treatment). Therefore, we thought that the overall effects of antidepressant treatment in term of various depression scores would better be estimated by separating the pretreatment and post-treatment instead of calculating the mean differences. Based on the limited data directly from the retrieved articles,^4,6–8 we estimated the overall depression treatment effects. With . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Related Article:

Response to Letter by Chen et al

Maree L. Hackett, Craig S. Anderson, and Allan O. House
Stroke 2006 37: 1367. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]