In reply

We appreciate the thoughtful questions from Drs Williams and Adetunji. As they indicate in their letter concerning our study, there has been an inconsistency between remission results as presented at the 2003 American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting and in the published article. In this letter, we clarify this inconsistency.

As described in the study protocol, remission results were prepared based on patients who had completed 4 weeks of acute-phase therapy. The poster presentation at the 2003 American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting provided these remission results, as did the original draft manuscript. As part of the scientific peer-review process at the ARCHIVES, a request was made for the article to alternatively provide remission results for all randomized patients to be consistent with the intent-to-treat-principle and with a definition used by other investigators. The article was revised to comply with the reviewer’s comment. Thus, the published article contains different remission results than those presented during the 2003 American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting