This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (5)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

I was interested by the retrospective by Schou¹ on lithium treatment and the accompanying commentaries. However, some important recent developments and debates concerning lithium were not mentioned. Several commentators speculate on the reasons for the discrepancy between the dramatic results of the early placebo-controlled trials of lithium and subsequent comparative trials and naturalistic data. In an article published in 1995,² I pointed out that a possible explanation for this situation lies in the designs of these early studies. Many of them were discontinuation studies in which patients who had been receiving lithium were allocated to either continue receiving lithium or to have placebo substitution. This type of design cannot address the question of the efficacy of prophylaxis, particularly because of mounting evidence that lithium withdrawal induces manic relapse. Recent reviews on the subject have concluded that there is substantial evidence of a lithium withdrawal–related phenomenon.^3-4 It is most surprising that . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Discrepancies in the Efficacy of Lithium
Grof and Alda
Arch Gen Psychiatry 2000;57:191-191.
FULL TEXT