Depression Prevelance and Relapse

     A speaker we had this semester, Olu Ajilore, presented his work and study about late-life depression (LLD) and the phenotypic predictors of relapsing into that. The specific study we looked at was titled “Reconsidering remission in recurrent late-life depression: clinical presentation and phenotypic predictors of relapse following successful antidepressant treatment.” Him and his colleagues looked at people suffering from late-life depression and the relapses and recurrences they fell into even after consistent treatment and maintenance. It was a longitudinal study that included 135 remitted LLD participants and 69 comparison participants that were used as a control group. All participants were clinically assessed every two months for two years while receiving typical treatment using antidepressants. By doing this, they discovered that sixty (44%) LLD participants experienced a relapse over the two-year period. They also found that, by comparing LLD participants and the control group,  residual depressive symptom severity, rumination, executive dysfunction, and medical comorbidity significantly predicted LLD classification. 

In a another scientific study titled “Trends in U.S. Depression Prevalence from 2015 to 2020: The Widening Treatment Gap,” Lisa Dierker and her colleagues pulled data from the 2015-2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health and found that from 2015-2020, there was an increase in depression without a corresponding increase in treatment. They also found that in 2020, past-12 month depression was widespread in nearly 1 in 10 Americans and nearly 1 in 5 in adolescents and young adults. This was attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic that forced almost all Americans into quarantine.

I found the similarity in these scientific findings to be very interesting because both of them highlight how prevalent and persistent depression is. There are millions of people across the world suffering from this deadly condition and these two articles really showed how important it is for us as a society to spread awareness about it and especially make treatment more accessible and available to anybody and everybody before it evolves into something much more concerning. In Dierker's work, it showed how depression spiked from 2015-2020, and yet there was no increased supply in treatment options. In Ajilore’s work, it was shown that even with consistent treatment, people still relapsed into depression which points to how complex this condition can be. Overall, both of these studies emphasize the need for more effective, readily available treatment for those suffering from depression and the need for more widespread awareness about it. 

  References

Goodwin, Renee D et al. “Trends in U.S. Depression Prevalence From 2015 to 2020: The Widening Treatment Gap.” American journal of preventive medicinevol. 63,5 (2022): 726-733. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2022.05.014

Taylor, Warren D. et al. “Reconsidering Remission in Recurrent Late-Life Depression: Clinical Presentation and Phenotypic Predictors of Relapse Following Successful Antidepressant Treatment.” Psychological Medicine 54.16 (2024): 4896–4907. Web.