are alcoholism treatments effective the project match data酗酒治疗有效的项目匹配数据.pdfVIP

BMC Public Health BioMed Central Research article Open Access Are alcoholism treatments effective? The Project MATCH data Robert B Cutler* and David A Fishbain Address: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, USA Email: Robert B Cutler* - r.cutler@; David A Fishbain - d.fishbain@ * Corresponding author Published: 14 July 2005 Received: 02 September 2004 Accepted: 14 July 2005 BMC Public Health 2005, 5:75 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-5-75 This article is available from: /1471-2458/5/75 © 2005 Cutler and Fishbain; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Project MATCH was the largest and most expensive alcoholism treatment trial ever conducted. The results were disappointing. There were essentially no patient-treatment matches, and three very different treatments produced nearly identical outcomes. These results were interpreted post hoc as evidence that all three treatments were quite effective. We re-analyzed the data in order to estimate effectiveness in relation to quantity of treatment. Methods: This was a secondary analysis of data from a multisite clinical trial of alcohol dependent volunteers (N = 1726) who received outpa