We received and read the letter to the Editors from Drs Guiraud and van den Brink regarding our article entitled 'A Meta-Regression of Trial Features Predicting the Effects of Alcohol Use Disorder Pharmacotherapies on Drinking Outcomes in Randomized Clinical Trials: A Secondary Data Analysis'.
We believe that the comments provided by the authors are derived from differing findings in their recently published paper 'Sodium Oxybate for Alcohol Dependence: A Network Meta-Regression Analysis Considering Population Severity at Baseline and Treatment Duration'. We would like to highlight that the two manuscripts took different approaches to answer different questions. Our manuscript used a meta-regression approach with two arms (pharmacotherapy treatment vs. control) to answer the question of what trial features predict the efficacy of pharmacotherapies on drinking outcomes across a range of 19 pharmacotherapies. Guiraud et al. used a network meta-regression approach focused solely on one pharmacotherapy, sodium oxybate, as a treatment for alcohol use disorder. It is therefore unsurprising that different methodological approaches to solve different questions resulted in different answers...