Ymkje Anna de Vries

University of Groningen | RUG · University Center for Psychiatry

Background: Depression and anxiety disorders commonly have an onset in adolescence. Although school is an important environment for adolescents, evidence regarding the association between school-related factors and internalizing symptoms is limited. The objective of the current study is to provide further insight into these associations.Method: 383...

Medicine regulators need to judge whether a drug’s favorable effects outweigh its unfavorable effects based on a dossier submitted by an applicant, such as a pharmaceutical company. Because scientific knowledge is inherently uncertain, regulators also need to judge the credibility of these effects by identifying and evaluating uncertainties. We per...

Objective The standard method of generating disorder‐specific disability scores has lay raters make rankings between pairs of disorders based on brief disorder vignettes. This method introduces bias due to differential rater knowledge of disorders and inability to disentangle the disability due to disorders from the disability due to comorbidities....

Verschillende instanties, waaronder gemeenten, worstelen met het vraagstuk van vroegdiagnostiek en vroege behandeling van kinderen. Moet je psychische stoornissen bij kinderen zo vroeg als mogelijk ‘vinden’ zodat je snel een diagnose kunt stellen en een behandeling kan starten? Dit lijkt een belangrijk beleidsuitgangspunt voor gemeenten; ‘vroeg erb...

In their reply to our editorial (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2023, 64, 464), Dekkers et al. (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2023, 64, 470) argue that treatment is the best choice for children with mental disorders because there is ‘sound evidence’ that interventions are effective, also in the long term. We agree that th...

Mental disorders may have severe consequences for individuals across their entire lifespan, especially when they start in childhood. Effective treatments (both psychosocial and pharmacological) exist for the short‐term treatment of common mental disorders in young people. These could, at least theoretically, prevent future problems, including recur...

Purpose Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals, and LB women specifically, have an increased risk for psychiatric morbidity, theorized to result from stigma-based discrimination. To date, no study has investigated the mental health disparities between LGB and heterosexual AQ1individuals in a large cross-national population-based comparison. T...

Patient‐reported helpfulness of treatment is an important indicator of quality in patient‐centered care. We examined its pathways and predictors among respondents to household surveys who reported ever receiving treatment for major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, specific phobia, post‐traumatic stress disorder, bipolar diso...

Background Previous research has suggested that statistical power is suboptimal in many biomedical disciplines, but it is unclear whether power is better in trials for particular interventions, disorders, or outcome types. We therefore performed a detailed examination of power in trials of psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, and complementary and alter...

Background Valid assessment of drug efficacy and safety requires an evidence base free of reporting bias. Using trial reports in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug approval packages as a gold standard, we previously found that the published literature inflated the apparent efficacy of antidepressant drugs. The objective of the current study wa...

Aims Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterised by a recurrent course and high comorbidity rates. A lifespan perspective may therefore provide important information regarding health outcomes. The aim of the present study is to examine mental disorders that preceded 12-month MDD diagnosis and the impact of these disorders on depression outcome...

Approval and prescription of psychotropic drugs should be informed by the strength of evidence for efficacy. Using a Bayesian framework, we examined (1) whether psychotropic drugs are supported by substantial evidence (at the time of approval by the Food and Drug Administration), and (2) whether there are systematic differences across drug groups....

Background Following testing in clinical trials, the use of remdesivir for treatment of COVID-19 has been authorized for use in parts of the world, including the USA and Europe. Early authorizations were largely based on results from two clinical trials. A third study published by Wang et al. was underpowered and deemed inconclusive. Although regul...

Background Although randomized trials show that social phobia treatments can be effective, it is unclear whether patients experience treatment as helpful in clinical practice. We investigated this issue by assessing perceived treatment helpfulness for specific phobia in a cross-national epidemiological survey. Methods Cross-sectional population-ba...

Objective Approval and prescription of drugs should be informed by the strength of evidence for efficacy. While there is no formal policy towards different standards for drug approval, the typical strength of evidence might differ for different psychotropic drug groups. Using a Bayesian framework, we examine (1) whether psychotropic drugs are suppo...

Background Depressive and anxiety disorders are highly comorbid, which has been theorized to be due to an underlying internalizing vulnerability. We aimed to identify groups of participants with differing vulnerabilities by examining the course of internalizing psychopathology up to age 45. Methods We used data from 24158 participants (aged 45+) i...

Aims Epidemiological studies indicate that individuals with one type of mental disorder have an increased risk of subsequently developing other types of mental disorders. This study aimed to undertake a comprehensive analysis of pair-wise lifetime comorbidity across a range of common mental disorders based on a diverse range of population-based sur...

Following testing in clinical trials, the use of remdesivir for treatment of COVID-19 has been authorized for use in parts of the world, including the USA and Europe. These early authorizations were largely based on results from two clinical trials. A third study published by Wang et al. was deemed inconclusive. We demonstrate the utility of Bayesi...

Aims Intermittent explosive disorder (IED) is characterised by impulsive anger attacks that vary greatly across individuals in severity and consequence. Understanding IED subtypes has been limited by lack of large, general population datasets including assessment of IED. Using the 17-country World Mental Health surveys dataset, this study examined...

Use of methylphenidate in children has increased substantially, despite conflicting evidence regarding efficacy. In this study, prescription data were analyzed in relation to the publication of new evidence regarding efficacy. Incidence rates and prescribed doses of methylphenidate increased, with a decline during the last few years. Duration of us...

An update of the chapter on Mental, Behavioral and Neurodevelopmental Disorders in the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) is of great interest around the world. The recent approval of the 11th Revision of the ICD (ICD-11) by the World Health Organization (WHO) raises broad questions about the status of nosolo...

Aims Mental disorders are associated with lower subjective social status (SSS), but a more nuanced understanding of this relationship is needed. We examined the influence of disorder age of onset and recency on SSS and studied whether mental disorders are also associated with the discrepancy between actual and desired SSS. Method Data are from the...

Background Antidepressant medications (ADMs) are widely used and long-term use is increasing. Given this extensive use and recommendation of ADMs in guidelines, one would expect ADMs to be universally considered effective. Surprisingly, that is not the case; fierce debate on their benefits and harms continues. This editorial seeks to understand why...

Abstract Background Specific phobia (SP) is a relatively common disorder associated with high levels of psychiatric comorbidity. Because of its early onset, SP may be a useful early marker of internalizing psychopathology, especially if generalized to multiple situations. This study aimed to evaluate the association of childhood generalized SP with...

Background The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, version 5 (DSM‐5) definition of agoraphobia (AG) as an independent diagnostic entity makes it timely to re‐examine the epidemiology of AG. Study objective was to present representative data on the characteristics of individuals who meet DSM‐IV criteria for AG (AG without a histor...

Background: Antidepressants remain controversial, partly due to allegations that disappointing results were buried and because of their modest average efficacy. AIM: To investigate bias in the antidepressant literature and the possibilities for predicting which patients with depression or anxiety do receive significant benefits from antidepressant...

Background Previous studies on reporting bias generally examined whether trials were published in stand-alone publications. In this study, we investigated whether pooled-trials publications constitute a specific form of reporting bias. We assessed whether negative trials were more likely to be exclusively published in pooled-trials publications tha...

Evidence-based medicine is the cornerstone of clinical practice, but it is dependent on the quality of evidence upon which it is based. Unfortunately, up to half of all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have never been published, and trials with statistically significant findings are more likely to be published than those without (Dwan et al., 20...

Background Improvement in depression within the first 2 weeks of antidepressant treatment predicts good outcomes, but non-improvers can still respond or remit, whereas improvers often do not. Aims We aimed to investigate whether early improvement of individual depressive symptoms better predicts response or remission. Method We obtained individua...

1 Background It has been suggested that antidepressant benefits are smaller for mild than severe depression. Because antidepressants are also used for anxiety disorders, obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD), and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we examined the influence of severity for these disorders. 2 Methods We used individual patient data...

The Dutch guideline for the treatment of depression in young people recommends initiating antidepressant treatment with fluoxetine, as the evidence for its efficacy is strongest and the risk of suicidality may be lower than with other antidepressants. Furthermore, low starting doses are recommended. We aimed to determine whether antidepressant pres...

Previous research has shown that reporting bias has inflated the apparent efficacy of antidepressants. We investigated whether apparent safety was also affected. We included 133 trials, involving 31,296 patients, of second-generation antidepressants for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD) or anxiety disorders, obtained from Food and Dr...

Letter to the Editor: Moving science forward by increasing awareness of reporting and citation biases: a reply to Vrshek-Schallhorn et al. (2016) - Y. A. de Vries, A. M. Roest, M. Franzen, M. R. Munafò, J. A. Bastiaansen

Background: Caspi et al.'s 2003 report that 5-HTTLPR genotype moderates the influence of life stress on depression has been highly influential but remains contentious. We examined whether the evidence base for the 5-HTTLPR-stress interaction has been distorted by citation bias and a selective focus on positive findings. Method: A total of 73 pri...

Background Antidepressants are established first-line treatments for anxiety disorders, but it is not clear whether they are equally effective across the severity range. Aims To examine the influence of baseline severity of anxiety on antidepressant efficacy for generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder (SAD), obsessive-compulsive...

Objective: To examine if Dutch physicians adhere to the national guidelines on the treatment of depression in children and adolescents. Design: Retrospective database research. Method: Data on children and adolescents aged between 6 and 17 years were selected from the IADB, a Dutch database of filled prescriptions. We examined whether children...

Studies have shown that the scientific literature has overestimated the efficacy of antidepressants for depression, but other indications for these drugs have not been considered. To examine reporting biases in double-blind, placebo-controlled trials on the pharmacologic treatment of anxiety disorders and quantify the extent to which these biases i...