Critical appraisal for psychiatry exams

Meet the stem

You turn the page in Paper B and find eight lines of abstract. A 12-week randomised trial of an antidepressant in 180 outpatients. Primary outcome: mean change on a clinician-rated scale. "Response" was 52 percent on drug versus 40 percent on placebo. The abstract's final sentence: "Drug X reduced non-response by 20 percent."^[3][26]

You have about ninety seconds. Three marks are sitting in that last sentence, two in the outcome definition, and two more in what the abstract does not say about who dropped out.^[3][22]

This page is the exam-room drill: the sequence, the arithmetic you must do cold, and the traps. The deeper machinery — RoB 2's five domains one by one, tau-squared and prediction intervals, network meta-analysis assumptions, the five GRADE steps, and the Turner publication-bias story — lives in the foundations topic Critical appraisal (advanced). Read that for the method; read this for the marks.^[1][10][14]

References26ShowHide

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