Do depressed patients on adjunctive atypical antipsychotics demonstrate a better quality of life compared to those on antidepressants only? A comparative cross-sectional study of a nationally representative sample of the US population

Antidepressants and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) for patients with depression: Analysis of the medical expenditure panel survey from the United States

“…After adjusting for the effect of publication bias in this meta-analysis, the subgroup analysis uncovered a difference between short-term trials (treatment duration of ≤ 3 months) which found an insignificantly better result for pharmacotherapy and long-term trials (treatment duration of > 3 months) which shows insignificantly superior result for psychotherapy [ 15 ]. In addition, the adjuvant use of atypical antipsychotic medication was found to be associated with a lower quality of life compared with the use of antidepressant medications alone [ 40 ].…”

The impact of depression medications on oral antidiabetic drug adherence in patients with diabetes and depression

“…One found that adjunctive aripiprazole resulted in greater improvement of depressive symptoms compared to switching antidepressants (Han et al, 2015) and the other concluded that adjunctive aripiprazole and bupropion were equally efficacious, although patients on aripiprazole experienced faster remission (Cheon et al, 2017). To date, “real-world” studies have failed to demonstrate the effectiveness of SGAs over other depression therapies for MDD in terms of quality of life, hospitalizations, or healthcare costs (Al-Ruthia, Hong, & Solomon, n.d.; Hassan et al, 2015; Hassan, Farmer, Brahm, & Neas, 2016b; Wade, Kindermann, Hou, & Thase, 2014). We reiterate what other authors have previously stated, that there is limited knowledge on proper and effective use of SGAs for MDD outside of clinical trials and more research on practical clinical issues in routine practice is warranted (Han et al, 2013; Pae & Patkar, 2013).…”