Response to “Trust, but verify” by Banaschewski et al.

What is it about?

Banaschewski et al. (2016) question the quality of our Cochrane review on methylphenidate for children and adolescents with ADHD (Storebø et al., 2015). Our response to the criticism is as follows: We found no signifi cant diff erence in a subgroup analysis comparing parallel and cross-over trials, and we noted considerable statistical heterogeneity between the two trial groups. Furthermore, we had only end-of-trial data from the cross-over trials, which means that they cannot be considered to be independent data (Higgins & Green, 2011). It is not recommended to pool end-of-trial data from crossover trials with parallel group trials (Higgins & Green, 2011). Had we done so, we would have risked introducing a “unit-of-analysis error”.

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