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Drug Treatment of Panic Disorder

Reply to Comment by Marks and Associates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Gerald L. Klerman
Gerald L. Klerman*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College, New York, NY 10021, USA
*
Dr Klerman died on 3 April 1992. Correspondence should be sent to his wife, Dr Myrna Weissman, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Department of Psychiatry, 722 W. 168th St. Unit 14, New York, NY 10032
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Extract

The February 1992 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry contained the summary report from the Second Phase of the Cross-National Collaborative Panic Study (CNCPS) on a clinical treatment trial of panic disorder. This manuscript was submitted in 1988 and took four years of response to critiques and revisions to generate a manuscript that was acceptable to the Editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry. In the same issue, Marks et al (1992) provided a ‘Comment’ which was critical of the study, calling it an “elephantine labour” which “resulted in the delivery of a mouse” and was highly critical of the statistical analyses and interpretation. Moreover, their ‘Comment’ was a springboard for discussing general issues in the treatment of panic disorder and the relative value of pharmacological versus psychological treatments. In our opinion, the Marks et al ‘Comment’ is inaccurate and misleading. At many points, they make reference to topics being missing that are actually addressed to our manuscript and they presented a statistical summary in Table 1 (p. 203) of our data which was inaccurate. In this Comment, we address each item criticised.

Type
Comment
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 161 , Issue 4 , October 1992 , pp. 465 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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Footnotes

1.

This comment was compiled by Gerald Klerman and co-authored by: Per Bech, Otto Benkert, Sydney Brandon, Giovanni B. Cassano, George C. Curtis, Juan R. de la Fuente, Jose Guimon, Jose Luis Ayuso Gutierrez, Heinz Katschnig, Philip W. Lavori, Carlos A. Leon, J. Lopez-Ibor, Jr, Juan Massana, Mogens Mellergard, Jan-Otto Ottoson, Raben Rosenberg, Sir Martin Roth, Javier Sepulveda-Amor, Leslie Solyom, Marco Versiani, and Jean Wilmotte.

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