Misinterpreting this Depression Study May Lead Doctors to Treat the Wrong People

The study claims to predict response to escitalopram treatment — but that is a potentially dangerous interpretation.

It’s a new year, and after a little holiday break I’m back and, frankly, a bit cranky as I peruse the recently-published medical literature, so I’m focusing today on a rather small study, but one that hits a pet peeve of mine and so I’m going to channel my inner Andy Rooney here and gripe for a bit.

Appearing in JAMA Network Open we have this article with the compelling title “Use of Machine Learning for Predicting Escitalopram Treatment Outcome From EEG Recordings in Adults with Depression”.

I like to know what I’m getting into when I read a title. And this title promises quite a bit. To me, it reads like researchers used an EEG and some fancy machine-learning stuff to predict which patients with depression would benefit from escitalopram treatment.

That idea, using a machine learning model to choose the best psychiatric treatment is holy grail-level personalized medicine…