Comorbid Medical Conditions May Point to Patients Most Likely to Develop Treatment-Resistant Depression

It is well known that some patients with depression will fail to respond to medications, but clinicians currently have few ways to predict those most likely to develop treatment-resistant depression (TRD). If clinicians could predict whether patients who are diagnosed with depression for the first time would develop TRD, they could monitor these patients more closely and adjust treatment more quickly.Aretrospective cohort study published inDepression and Anxiety found that more than 10% of adults newly diagnosed and treated for depression developed TRD within a year. Those who developed TRD tended to be younger and more commonly present with fatigue, substance use disorders, anxiety, psychiatric conditions, insomnia, and pain than subjects with no TRD.“When a health care provider sees a patient who is being diagnosed with depression for the first time, the presence of these characteristics could alert her/him to the possibility that the patient could develop TRD,” M. Soledad Cepeda, M.D., Ph.D., of Janssen Research& Development and colleagues wrote.Cepeda and colleagues analyzed data contained in two U.S. health claims databases, focusing on adults who had received pharmacotherapy for depression between 2000 and 2016. To be included in the analysis, patients were required to (1) have filled a prescription for an antidepressant for the first time as indicated in the database, (2) appear in the database for at least a year before the index date (the date the first antid...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: anxiety depression Depression and Anxiety insomnia Soledad Cepeda substance use disorders treatment-resistant depression Source Type: research