LaTimes.com

Only people with severe depression
benefit from antidepressants, says research published in the Journal of the
American Medical Assn. Others do better with nonmedical approaches.

By Shari Roan

January 6, 2010

Antidepressant medications probably provide little
or no benefit to people with mild or moderate depression, a new study has
found. Rather, the mere act of seeing a doctor, discussing symptoms and
learning about depression probably triggers the improvements many patients
experience while on medication.

Only people with very severe depression receive
additional benefits from drugs, said the senior author of the study, Robert J.
DeRubeis, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor. The research was
released online Tuesday and will be published today in the Journal of the
American Medical Association.

Hundreds of studies have attested to the benefits
of antidepressants over placebos, DeRubeis said. But many studies involve only
participants with severe depression. Confusion arises, he said, “”because
there is a tendency to generalize the findings to mean that all depressed
people benefit from medications.””

The current analysis attempted to quantify how much
of antidepressants’ benefit is attributable to chemical effects on the brain
and how much can be explained by other factors, such as visiting a doctor,
taking action to feel better or merely the passage of time.

Researchers reviewed six randomized,
placebo-controlled studies with a total of 718 patients who took either an
antidepressant or placebo. The patients were adults with levels of depression
ranging from mild to very severe based on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale,
a questionnaire widely used in depression research. The studies did not exclude
patients who were likely to have a strong response to a placebo. Researchers
then compared the patients’ depression scores at the beginning of treatment
with those after at least six weeks of treatment.

The study found that the magnitude of the drugs’
benefit increased with the baseline level of depression. The effect of
treatment was similar in people with mild, moderate and severe symptoms,
regardless of whether they took an antidepressant or placebo. Only the people
who rated very severe on the depression scale at the start of the study showed
measurable improvements on antidepressants.

There is no doubt that there are tremendous
benefits from antidepressants, as our study showed,”” DeRubeis said.
“”But this study helps us resolve, to some degree, the question of how much
benefit people can expect from the medicines themselves when symptoms are not
severe.”” ??Other research has also found that antidepressants are most
effective for severe symptoms, said Dr. Philip Wang, deputy director of the
National Institute of Mental Health. Though it could be that antidepressants
don’t work well for mild to moderate depression, it’s also possible that people
enrolled in antidepressant studies have robust placebo responses that mask some
of the impact of the medication.

A severely depressed person who would probably
benefit from antidepressants might have symptoms such as frequent weeping,
feelings of guilt and sadness, thoughts that life is not worth living, problems
sleeping, fatigue and withdrawal from normal activities, DeRubeis said.

Better antidepressants are needed for people with
mild to moderate depression, Wang said, as is research on how to diagnose
depression with tools, such as biomarkers, that could help personalize treatment.

Of the six studies in the current analysis, three
involved selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, the most commonly
used antidepressants, and three involved an older class of medications called
tricyclics. Both classes are thought to be equally effective, although SSRIs
are associated with fewer side effects.

One exception to the study findings, DeRubeis said,
was people with dysthymia, or chronic, low-level depression. The analysis
assessed severity of symptoms, not chronicity, he said. Other studies have
established that people with chronic depression, no matter how severe, tend to
respond well to antidepressants while other treatment may be ineffective.

La Times article

shari.roan@latimes.com