A Machine Learning Approach to Identifying Placebo Responders in Late-Life Depression Trials.
Journal:
The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry
PMID:
29398354
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Despite efforts to identify characteristics associated with medication-placebo differences in antidepressant trials, few consistent findings have emerged to guide participant selection in drug development settings and differential therapeutics in clinical practice. Limitations in the methodologies used, particularly searching for a single moderator while treating all other variables as noise, may partially explain the failure to generate consistent results. The present study tested whether interactions between pretreatment patient characteristics, rather than a single-variable solution, may better predict who is most likely to benefit from placebo versus medication.