Note that Figure 3 also mentions the Tylenol combination effect and even shows how 10mg Phenylephrine + Tylenol performs somewhere between 10mg and 45mg of phenylephrine.
The article author just cherry-picked the one study where phenylephrine performed the worst. Cherry-picking a single study to support a conclusion and ignoring meta-analyses would normally get someone torn apart in the HN comments but apparently everyone loves pseudoephedrine so it gets a pass.
"Data from 7 crossover studies involving a total of 113 subjects were reanalyzed and then pooled for meta-analysis"
This is a huge red flag - I've read too many of Derek Lowe's blog posts to take that kind of study very seriously as medical advice. Much more promising leads than this have utterly bombed in clinical trials, it happens all the time.
Read the whole abstract. They showed which studies reached statistical significance on their own.
You could just read those studies and ignore the meta-analyses if you want.
I honestly don't understand this current trend of assuming meta-analyses are inherently incorrect and cherry-picking the worst study as the source of the truth.
It's not the meta-analysis part that's the biggest red flag, it's "a total of 113 subjects". That's the size of a Phase I trial, and the road to Phase III and clinical approval has a crazy high attrition rate.
