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Open Access

Correspondence

Is It Just a Marker for Increased Care?

  • Richard Hockey

Citation: Hockey R (2006) Is It Just a Marker for Increased Care? PLoS Med 3(9): e406. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030406

Published: September 26, 2006

Copyright: © 2006 Richard Hockey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this article.

Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

Because of the nature of the analysis used in this study [1], no conclusion is possible. There are plenty of examples in the literature demonstrating the “ecological fallacy”. Studies such as this have very little utility other than to generate hypotheses. I tend to think that this association is a marker for greater recognition and treatment for depression. However, it’s a brave epidemiologist who would draw any conclusions at all from an ecological association such as this where the outcome is relatively rare.

Reference

  1. 1. Milane MS, Suchard MA, Wong ML, Licinio J (2006) Modeling of the temporal patterns of fluoxetine prescriptions and suicide rates in the United States. PLoS Med 3: e190. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030190.