Phobia Study Criteria-Reply

In Reply.—  We thank Dr Snaith for the opportunity to remedy an omission from our article. We accepted no patient into our study who had previously received an antidepressant treatment. Therefore, Dr Snaith's advice to exclude drug-treated patients is correct with regard to our published article, but is irrelevant to our actual study. In any case, his point is more relevant to the study by Marks et al since our subjects showed a benefit from drug treatment.With regard to the relationship of chronicity to treatment effect, Dr Snaith raised a researchable question. We are currently reviewing our data for predictors of drug effect. If we had not included patients with such "vast ranges of duration," we would not have been able to deal with this issue. Therefore, we think our study does make some sense, if only to afford the opportunity of testing Dr Snaith's hypothesis. Our initial analyses showed