Net gain analysis, an addition to responder analysis – The case of antipsychotic treatment of acute mania

Net Gain Analysis (NGA) is proposed as an alternative to Responders Analysis (RA) as a more comprehensive method to tap clinical relevance of the effect of treatment. NGA is the group difference in responders minus the group difference in deteriorators; while RA is the group difference in responders. We examined the performance of these two methods in a dataset consisting of individual patient data from 10 randomized controlled trials (N = 2666) of five different antipsychotics in patients with acute mania by comparing the rank ordering of the five compounds according to both systems (NGA and RA). The rank order did not differ between the 2 systems but the inferiority of one compound was revealed more evidently by the NGA in comparison to the RA.