Originally published: . Volume 13, No. 6. Source pages: 8.
Medscape Medical News reported that a new study suggests that antidepressants do not significantly improve health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients battling depression. The research relied on 11 years of data using the US Medical Expenditures Panel Survey (MEPS), which tracks health service use in the U.S. The study found that, while over half of the 17.5 million adults diagnosed with depression between 2005 and 2016 were treated with antidepressants, their HRQoL was not significantly different from those who were not being treated with antidepressant medication. "We are not saying that antidepressant medications are not helpful at all; HRQoL is only one of many measures intended to assess health outcomes," Almohammed told Medscape Medical News. "Based on our research design and data, we can only say that patients who used antidepressant medications did not experience better change in terms of HRQoL compared to patients who did not use antidepressant medications," he said. Some experts note that those who receive anti- depressants tend to have a lower HRQoL than those who do not, which introduces a bias that is hard to eliminate in a naturalistic study.
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