Cognitive Behavioural Therapy vs. Psychoanalysis

Clinical trials of cognitive behavioural psychotherapy (CBT) for depression are often of poor quality - and are no better than trials of the rival psychodynamic school.

So says a new American Journal of Psychiatry paper that could prove controversial.

CBT is widely perceived as having a better evidence base than other therapies. The "creation myth" of CBT (at least as I was taught it) is that it was invented by a psychoanalyst who got annoyed at the unscientific nature of psychodynamic i.e. Freudian-influenced therapy. CBT has always looked on clinical trials more favorably than the dynamic school.

However, the authors of this meta-analysis found that while there are certainly lots of published CBT trials for depression, they're actually no better quality than the psychodynamic trials.

"Surprisingly" (their word), they found no difference between the CBT for depression trials, and the psychodynamic trials, on a rating score of trial methodology.

Trials got better over time, but the two groups improved equally (see above). The mean score was 25.5 for CBT and 25.1 for dynamic, on a scale that goes from 0 to 48. Anything over 24 points is deemed acceptable but this is clearly an arbitrary cut-off.

The RCTP-QRS scale is relatively new and it was developed by the people who wrote this paper (albeit with the input of other experts.) There's 24 items and each gets a score from 0 (bad) to 2 (good). Items are things like "Adaquate sample size", "Patients randomly assigned to group", etc.

Worryingly, better CBT trials tended to find smaller benefits of CBT over the comparison treatment. The overall results showed that while CBT was clearly better than doing nothing, it was pretty much the same as antidepressants, and other psychotherapies, in adults with depression:

The article follows one from the same group, Gerber et al, who reviewed the evidence for psychodynamic therapy in more detail. And last year, another team reported evidence of publication bias in psychotherapy trials. In this study, the authors report possible publication bias, but they don't go into detail.

Overall this is interesting stuff, and a reminder that while CBT has the most evidence of any psychotherapy, this is not the same thing as saying that it has the best evidence...

Nathan C. Thoma et al (2011). A Quality-Based Review of Randomized Controlled Trials of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Depression: An Assessment and Metaregression American Journal of Psychiatry

Beware Dead Fish Statistics

An editorial in the Journal of Physiology offers some important notes on statistics.

But even more importantly, it refers to a certain blog in the process:

The Student’s t-test merely quantifies the ‘Lack of support’ for no effect. It is left to the user of the test to decide how convincing this lack might be. A further difficulty is evident in the repeated samples we show in Figure 2: one of those samples was quite improbable because the P-value was 0.03, which suggests a substantial lack of support, but that’s chance for you! A parody of this effect of multiple sampling, taken to extremes, can be found at http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2009/09/fmri-gets-slap-in-face-with-dead-fish.html

This makes it the second academic paper to refer to this blog as far. Although I feel rather bad about this one, since the citation ought to have been to the original dead salmon brain scanning study by Craig Bennett. I just wrote about it.

Actually, though, this editorial was published in five separate journals: The Journal of Physiology, Experimental Physiology, the British Journal of Pharmacology, Advances in Physiology Education, Microcirculation, and Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology. Phew.

In fact, you could say that this makes not two but six citations for Neuroskeptic now. Yes. Let's go with that.

Anyway, after discussing the history of the ubiquitous Student's t-test - which was invented in a brewery - it reminds us that the p value you get from such a t-test doesn't tell you how likely it is that your results are "real".

Rather, it tells you how often you'd get the result you did, if there was no effect and it was just random chance. That's a big difference. A p value of 0.01 doesn't mean your results are 99% likely to be real. It means that there's a 1% chance that you'd get them, by chance. But if you did say 100 experiments, or more likely, 100 statistical tests on the same data, then you'd expect to get at least one result with a p value of 0.01 purely by chance.

In that case it would be silly to think that the finding was only 1% likely to be a fluke. Of course it could be true. But we'd have no particular reason to think so until we get some more data.

This is what the dead salmon study was all about. This multiple comparisons issue is very old, but very important. Arguably the biggest problem in science today is that we're doing too many comparisons and only reporting the significant ones.

Drummond GB, & Tom BD (2011). Statistics, probability, significance, likelihood: words mean what we define them to mean. British journal of pharmacology, 164 (6), 1573-6 PMID: 22022804

A Dangerous Truth about Antidepressants

An opinion piece by veteran psychiatrist and antidepressant drug researcher Sheldon Preskorn contains a remarkable historical note -

“A dangerous idea!” That was the response after a presentation I gave to a small group of academic leaders with an interest in psychopharmacology [over 15 years ago].

What evoked such a response? The acknowledgment that most currently available antidepressants specifically treat only one out of four patients with major depression based on the bulk of clinical trials data.

There was no argument about the accuracy of this statement, but...some claim it is “dangerous” to admit that the specific response rate to most antidepressants is 20%–30% because such an acknowledgment might undermine the value of antidepressant treatment.

By the "specific" response rate Preskorn means the number of depressed people who'll get better on antidepressants and who wouldn't have done so well on placebo. This rate is fairly low because, while most people get better on antidepressants, most of those improve on placebo as well.

Preskorn rejects the view that it's dangerous to acknowledge this:

...there are several problems with this reaction. First, it is hard to deny reality. The “placebo” response rate in antidepressant trials is arguably the most reproducible finding in psychiatry. Moreover, if available antidepressants were magic bullets, then polypharmacy would not be so common. Second, this reaction ignores the fact that antidepressants are tremendously valuable to the patients who specifically benefit from them...

Every treatment in every area of medicine has limitations. Acknowledging that fact should galvanize us to action. Denial on the other hand perpetuates the status quo.

Unfortunately, we're not told who these academic leaders were. I wonder if they included amongst their ranks some of the "key opinion leaders" in the field whose leadership proved rather less than ideal. The column is actually adapted from a 1996 article by Preskorn.

Preskorn is right, of course, that denying the fact that antidepressants are only substantially better than placebo in a fraction of people who get diagnosed with "depression" is wrong, and also misses the point: because hundreds of millions of Americans have diagnosable depression (due to the loose definition of "depression"), even if they only helped 1% of them, they'd still help over a million people.

But he doesn't mention that this approach was ultimately self-defeating. As a result of the failure to acknowledge that antidepressants are only helpful in some cases of depression (namely "severe" depression), these drugs became very widely used and - oh dear - people started saying that the drugs are being overused, and don't work in most people who take them.

Whoever could have seen that coming.

This has "devalued" antidepressants - and psychiatry itself - more than anything else has.

Preskorn SH (2011). What Do the Terms "Drug-Specific Response/Remission Rate" and "Placebo" Really Mean? Journal of psychiatric practice, 17 (6), 420-424 PMID: 22108399

The Gene That's "For" Nothing

Scientists like to warn you not to talk about "the gene for" a particular disease or trait.

I've done so in previous posts e.g. this one or this one.

But such scalding is not always very effective. We like simple explanations, so we like to find simple connections between genes and phenotypes.

Which is why a new paper is important. The authors, a large Turkish-American collaboration, found that mutations in a gene, WDR62, are associated with severe brain malformations in 9 patients. But what's interesting is that it doesn't cause any particular malformation.

If you have two faulty copies of this gene, your brain won't be normal, but what goes wrong varies widely amongst different people. Although the 9 cases had some features in common, such as microcephaly (small head and brain), in other respects they differed greatly.

As the authors put it, mutations in WDR62 cause

a wide spectrum of severe cerebral cortical malformations including microcephaly, pachygyria with cortical thickening as well as hypoplasia of the corpus callosum. Some patients... had evidence of additional abnormalities including lissencephaly, schizencephaly, polymicrogyria and, in one instance, cerebellar hypoplasia, all traits traditionally regarded as distinct entities.

These are distinct entities, in the sense that you can have any one of them, without having the others. And they are different brain changes. What the authors mean is that everyone assumed that, because they're  different, they must have different genetic causes. They've just shown that this is wrong.

So what is WDR62 "for"? Experiments in mice showed it to be involved in the migration of new neurons from their origin to their final location in the brain. So it's "for" correct neuronal placement, although how it works remains unclear.

WDR62 ought to remind us that there's a long and winding road from gene to phenotype, and that the same gene can, when mutated, cause very different symptoms. This is especially interesting in the light of recent evidence showing that the same mutations can cause a range of behavioural disorders from autism to ADHD to schizophrenia.

Bilgüvar K, et al (2010). Whole-exome sequencing identifies recessive WDR62 mutations in severe brain malformations. Nature, 467 (7312), 207-10 PMID: 20729831

Was Evita Lobotomized?

Eva Peron, or Evita, is perhaps the most famous woman in Latin American history. As the wife of Argentinian leader Juan Peron she was immensely popular. But she died at the age of just 33 from cervical cancer, after a two year struggle with the disease.

A new paper makes the startling claim that Eva Peron may have received a prefrontal lobotomy in the months before her death. The lobotomy is best known as a treatment for mental disorders such as schizophrenia, but according to Nijensohn et al, Peron was given the operation as a kind of pain relief.

The claim was first made in 2005 by Dr George Udvarhelyi, who worked as a neurosurgeon in Argentina before moving to John Hopkins in Baltimore. After his retirement, Udvarhelyi told the Baltimore Sun that he'd performed the operation.

The authors of this paper checked out the claims against his unpublished memoirs. It turns out that they've just written Udvarhelyi's biography, and managed to slip in a plug for their book. Indeed, this paper could be seen as a plug. But anyway.

The early 1950s were the golden age of lobotomy and it does seem plausible that if she had one, it would have been kept secret. But it seems that the only direct evidence is Udvarhelyi's testimony. The authors point to various facts that could be seen as consistent with it, like this memoir by a close friend:

“The illness continued to advance. I visited her one afternoon andwas shown a notebook belonging to her brother Juancito. There was a drawing of Evita with her head criss-crossed by scissors. The sinister image suggested that she was either crazy or brain damaged. I found her very thin, quiet, and deeply introverted”

But to be honest this is pretty weak. The authors also admit that in interviews with scholarly experts on Peron's illness, they were all surprised by the idea.

They then point to postmortem X-rays of Peron's skull which were made public in 1955 to prove that her corpse hadn't been burned (long story). These, they suggest, show evidence of the kind of burr holes that were used to insert the lobotomy tools -

And they say that a photo of her shortly before her death shows an "indentation at the coronal level" -

Hmm. Not sure what to make of those. Ultimately though, the authors admit that the only way to know for sure would be to exhume Evita and study her skull, but this is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Nijensohn DE, Savastano LE, Kaplan AD, & Laws ER Jr (2011). New Evidence of Prefrontal Lobotomy in the Last Months of the Illness of Eva Perón. World neurosurgery PMID: 22079825