Psychiatr News November 2, 2007
Volume 42, Number 21, page 14
© 2007 American Psychiatric Association
Depressed Youth Respond Best to Combination Therapy
Dawn Duarte and
Aaron Levin
Adding CBT to fluoxetine treatment appears to provide depressed
adolescents with the benefits of both quick-acting and longer-duration
treatments.
Combining medication and psychotherapy provides adolescents with depression
the treatment advantages of both a sprint and a marathon.
The combination of the antidepressant medication fluoxetine (Prozac) and
cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) appears more effective than either strategy
alone for the long-term treatment of adolescents with depression, according to
the latest report from the Treatment for Adolescents With Depression Study
(TADS) in the October Archives of General Psychiatry.
The report lengthens observations in the TADS from the 12 weeks reported
earlier this year (Psychiatric News, March 2) to 36 weeks.
The benefit of combination therapy derives from the swifter initial action
of the drug linked with the longer term effects of CBT, said lead author John
March, M.D., M.P.H., professor and chief of child and adolescent psychiatry in
the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University.
All three treatments proved equally successful at the end of the trial, but
the response rate at that point is not the only standard to use, said March in
an interview with Psychiatric News.
"There are a lot of things we can do to get a patient better, but
faster is important too," he said. "Three months in the life of a
depressed kid is a long time."
The longer trial period is a more clinically relevant time frame, said Stan
Kutcher, M.D., the Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health in the
Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
"Nobody treats depression for just 12 weeks," Kutcher told
Psychiatric News. "This is the best information we have to date
about treating this disorder in young people."
The TADS study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in
1999, is part of ongoing research seeking to improve the treatment of
depression in youth. According to the researchers, major depressive disorder
affects approximately 5 percent of adolescents.
The researchers randomly assigned 327 patients aged 12 to 17 with a
DSM-IV diagnosis of major depression to one of the three treatment
conditions: combination therapy (n=107), fluoxetine therapy (n=109), or CBT
(n=111).
Fluoxetine was initially prescribed at a dosage of 10 mgs a day and then
titrated in response to whether patients experienced positive reactions to
treatment or underwent adverse effects. Patients receiving CBT had 15 one-hour
sessions during the first 12 weeks; thereafter, therapy was usually less
frequent, dependent on how the patients responded to treatment.
Positive responders were those who showed as "very much
improved" or "much improved" on the Clinical Global
Impressions—Improvement scale (CGI-I), which requires the clinician to
rate how much the patient's illness has improved or worsened relative to
baseline.
According to the researchers, 73 percent of patients receiving combination
therapy, 62 percent of those receiving fluoxetine only, and 48 percent of
those receiving CBT only responded to treatment after the initial 12 weeks. At
the end of 36 weeks, 243 (74 percent) of the patients remained in the study.
Positive response rates at that time were 86 percent for combination therapy,
81 percent for fluoxetine, and 81 percent for CBT.
CBT Response Increased Dramatically
However, the response to CBT alone increased from 48 percent to 65 percent
by week 18, while fluoxetine therapy response increased only from 65 percent
to 69 percent over the same period.
"The data show that CBT caught up with fluoxetine therapy by weeks 18
to 24 and to combination therapy by weeks 30 to 36," the researchers
said.
"Starting patients on fluoxetine improved functioning and lowered
illness burden quickly, while adding CBT seems to have had an additional
effect on modulating suicide," said Kutcher, who was not involved in the
trial.
The TADS findings were broadly generalizable, said the authors, because the
study population included both sexes, older and younger adolescents, minority
representation proportionate to the U.S. population, and those from varied
socioeconomic backgrounds.
"We designed the trial to represent what you'd want in clinical
practice," said March. "Patients were treated by real
psychiatrists and psychologists who paid attention to the details of clinical
practice, not just the protocols."
Kutcher, who has also conducted clinical trials related to adolescent
depression, was impressed by the study's ability to retain patients. Patient
retention is often difficult in clinical trials, especially in those in which
psychotropics are being used.
That retention, said March, was due to the effects of therapy as well as
having plans in place for expectable contingencies.
Many Had Suicidal Ideation
About 30 percent of study patients met criteria for clinically significant
suicidal ideation at baseline, based on the Suicidal Ideation
Questionnaire-Junior High School Version (SIQ-Jr). Despite
"aggressive" treatment over 36 weeks, there were suicidal events
(ideation, an attempt, or preparatory action) in 10 percent of patients,
nearly 70 percent of them occurring in the first 12 weeks—although not
evenly distributed across trial arms.
"There was twice the risk of suicidal events in the fluoxetine-only
group (16 patients), compared with the CBT (seven patients) or combination
(nine patients) groups," said March. There were no completed suicides in
the TADS.
"TADS replicated the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) findings on
the suicidal-event rate using fluoxetine alone," said March. An FDA
meta-analysis was used as the basis for the initial black-box label warning
regarding possible suicidality in youngsters taking antidepressants.
After considering the benefits and risks of the two treatments as
monotherapies, the authors concluded that fluoxetine alone or in combination
with CBT accelerated improvement of depression compared with CBT alone and
that adding CBT to fluoxetine therapy minimized suicidal ideation and
treatment-emergent suicidal events.
The TADS team will complete a full year of naturalistic follow-up, with
some patients continuing treatment and some not. Grants from NIMH and the
National Institute on Drug Abuse will also allow them to track their subjects
for five years to record functional outcomes as they transition to college,
young adulthood, and the workplace, said March.
TADS is a major contribution to guiding current practice, although only
future research can tell if a different SSRI or another form of psychotherapy
would give similar results, Kutcher said.
"We now have a safe and effective treatment for a very severe
disorder," he said. "Now providers have to ask what is our moral
and social responsibility to children, given that probably less than 30
percent of children who need help are getting it."
An abstract of "The Treatment for Adolescents With Depression
Study (TADS)" is posted at
<http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/64/10/1132>.
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