Treatment moderators of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy for depressive disorders: A systematic review / 中国心理卫生杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective: To facilitate personalized treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD) among adults, a systematic review was conducted to explore the moderators of treatment outcome between pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Methods: A systematic search of papers, published in English before April, 2017, was conducted in Pubmed, PsycINFO and EMbase. Totally 754 papers were screened in accordance with the predefined inclusive and exclusive criteria. Then the selected literatures were scored according to randomized controlled trial (RCT), statistical, and the sample-size quality criteria, and analyzed to find the moderators. Results: A total of 30 papers were included. Totally 11 got " + " in all four domains in RCT quality, 25 got the score of 4 in statistical quality, and 15 got 6 in sample-size quality. And the moderators were tested across 7 categories, namely, social demographic and contextual factors, symptom severity, preference, symptom subtype, comorbid personality traits or disorders, comorbid emotional disorders or emotional reactivity, and biological factors. Hypometabolism of the right anterior insula, positive summed functional connectivity, preference for psychotherapy, a greater number of events, married/co-habiting status, unemployment, therapy sites with better psychotherapists, more prior antidepressant exposures, and childhood trauma might be associated with better outcomes with psychotherapy, while preference for medicine, melancholic features, high levels of neuroticism, comorbid personality disorders, comorbid anxiety emotional disorders predicted better outcomes in pharmacotherapy than in psychotherapy. Conclusion: Patient characters have a moderation effect on outcomes between pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, thus these characters should be considered in the selection of the two therapies. Due to the limited quantity of these reviewed papers, however, the results should be retested by future studies.