The Concept of Recovery in Affective Disorders

133

Background: In clinical practice, bipolar patients complain of cognitive deficits such as attentional or memory disturbances. The main aim of this study was to determine whether subjective cognitive complaints were associated with objective neuropsychological impairments. Method: Sixty euthymic bipolar patients were assessed through a neuropsychological battery. A structured clinical interview was used to determine subjective cognitive complaints in patients. Thirty healthy controls were also included in the study in order to compare the neuropsychological performance among groups. Results: Bipolar patients with a higher number of episodes, especially the number of mixed episodes, longer duration of the illness and the onset of the illness at an earlier age showed more subjective complaints. Furthermore, bipolar patients with subjective complaints showed lower scores in several cognitive measures related to attention, memory and executive function compared with the control group. Nevertheless, patients without complaints also performed less well than controls in some neuropsychological measures. Conclusion: Bipolar patients who were aware of cognitive deficits were more chronic, had presented more previous episodes, especially mixed type, and their illness had started at an earlier age compared with patients who did not complain about cognitive problems. Moreover, patients with good cognitive insight also had a poorer social and occupational functioning as well as a poorer neuropsychological performance. However, the bipolar group without complaints also obtained lower scores in several tests compared with healthy controls. Cognitive status of bipolar patients should be routinely assessed, regardless of the patients awareness about their cognitive deficits.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Cognitive Complaints in Euthymic Bipolar Patients Reflect Objective Cognitive Impairment?

Martínez‐Arán

Vieta

Colom

et al. 2005

133

“…This is complicated as even the remitted patient cannot be considered as recovered [112]. The better equipped we are in defining improvement, or resistance, the better we will be able to research the problems of resistance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Treatment-Resistant Depression

Ananth

1998

Our ability to treat depression has improved with the availability of receptor-specific and chemically diverse groups of antidepressants. Even now, most of the short-term studies indicate that about 20% of depressed patients remain resistant to treatment. Therefore, it is important to properly assess the treatment-resistant depressed (TRD) patients and to separate the truly refractory patients from those inadequately treated. Undiagnosed medical conditions should be eliminated. TRD is neither a clinically nor a biologically identifiable entity. As there are no established methods for the treatment of TRD, all options should be considered. The clinician can be enriched by the knowledge of the treatment modalities available, and yet, in treating an individual patient, clinical skills, intuitive judgment, family history of response to drugs and side effects, all play a vital role. Several of the approaches described in the paper indicate available methods and their merits in general but there is no way of ascertaining by which particular method a patient should be treated. The three common methods of treatment are substitution of one antidepressant drug for another, combination therapies and augmentation techniques. These are based on clinical experiences and not research findings. Therefore the treatment of TRD patients is more an art than a science. The physician should assess all the psychopathological, phenomenological and psychosocial variables to appropriately treat an individual patient.

“…It is also conceivable that the inclusion of well-being as an outcome measure [26, 27, 28] may yield important information that is not yielded by symptom-oriented instruments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Outcome Definitions and Predictors in Depression

Tedlow

Fava

Uebelacker

et al. 1998

Background: The definition of outcome in antidepressant treatment studies may be a crucial factor influencing the relationship between possible treatment variables and treatment response. We therefore wanted to investigate possible relationships between baseline severity of depression and anxiety, and different definitions of outcome among outpatients with major depressive disorder undergoing antidepressant treatment. Methods: Two hundred and forty-eight patients diagnosed with major depression with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R Diagnosis – Patient Edition were treated with fluoxetine 20 mg/day for 8 weeks. Patients were evaluated both pretreatment and posttreatment with the 17-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (Ham-D-17), the Clinical Global Impressions Scales for Severity (CGI-S) and Improvement (CGI-I). We chose four continuous definitions of response using a linear regression method to analyze the relationship to baseline anxiety and depression. We used a logistic regression analysis for the relationship between seven categorical definitions of response and baseline severity of depression and anxiety. Results: Greater endpoint severity was significantly positively related to greater baseline severity of depression and anxiety. Lesser baseline severity of depression or anxiety predicted a greater degree of response on either the endpoint CGI-I score (with lower scores indicating greater improvement) or the percent change in HAM-D-17 score (with higher percent change indicating greater improvement). For all seven categorical definitions of response, lower baseline scores were significantly related to the probability of being a responder. Conclusions: These findings support the impression that how outcome is defined affects the strength and direction of observed relationships with predictive variables. Methodological implications are discussed.