St. John's Wort Versus Placebo in Social Phobia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recognition of social anxiety disorder (social phobia) as a common and disabling condition has led to new advances in its pharmacotherapy. Limitations with selective seroton reuptake inhibitors (side effects) and behavior therapy (scarcity of trained therapists), coupled with the tendency for patients with the disorder to self-medicate with alternative treatments, have led to the interest in Saint John's wort (SJW) (Hypericum perforatum) for this disorder. Although the literature is mixed, SJW has demonstrated efficacy in several double-blind depression trials, and some open-label studies with anxiety disorders. There is pharmacokinetic evidence for the serotonergic, domaminergic, and GABAminergic activity of hypericum, all of which are implicated in social anxiety disorder. This study was designed to generate pilot data to examine the potential efficacy of SJW in generalized social anxiety disorder. Forty subjects were randomized to 12 weeks of treatment with a flexible dose (600-1800 mg) of SJW (n = 20) or placebo (n = 20). Subjects with comorbid depression (clinician HAMD > 16) were excluded. Results found no significant difference between mean change on the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale with SJW (11.4) and placebo (13.2), P = 0.27, effect size = -0.09. Post-hoc analyses found larger effects sizes associated with increased baseline severity, omitting patients with variable scores (+/-30%) during the first week, and use of self-report HAMD scores for exclusion. Results of the study fail to provide evidence for the efficacy of SJW in social phobia. The impact of methodologic improvements on signal detection, while suggestive of improvement, remains to be established.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".