Doctors seek new tools to aid in depression treatment

Researchers are hunting new ways that primary care physicians can monitor a patient's progress.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Dec. 19, 2005.

With strategies to diagnose and initiate the treatment of depression in the primary care setting firmly established, researchers are increasingly looking for ways to improve patient adherence to therapies and measure their effectiveness.

Last month, a study published in the Canadian Medical Assn. Journal suggested that a brief tool could be used by primary care physicians to quantify the severity of depression and assess whether the chosen treatment was working.

"Depression is in many ways like hypertension or diabetes. It's a chronic disorder," said Roger S. McIntyre, MD, lead author and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. "But clinicians don't know how to measure it."

The paper found that seven questions from the 17-question Hamilton Depression Rating Scale -- HAMD-17 -- could assess effectively whether those being treated for major depression were getting relief from prescribed therapies. This scale could be administered by a primary care physician in three to four minutes and was found to be as effective as the more arduous 17-question version that is rarely used outside research or specialty settings.

"The tool was too big and too unwieldy for a family physician," said Dr. McIntyre, who is also head of the Mood Disorders Psychopharmacology Unit at the University Health Network in Toronto.

Experts praised the concept, particularly since the authors have placed the tool in the public domain, making it readily accessible, and said that additional tools to monitor depression were welcome.