{"id":53607,"date":"2015-01-26T08:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T13:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=53607"},"modified":"2015-01-26T03:22:11","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T08:22:11","slug":"latter-day-stard-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2015\/01\/26\/latter-day-stard-i\/","title":{"rendered":"latter day STAR*D I&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\">The initial fanfare with the SSRIs introducing the Antidepressant Age [Prozac 1988] was followed by a period of disillusionment as the lower than hoped [<em>hyped<\/em>] response rates became apparent. While the logic behind what came next isn&#8217;t totally clear to me, the non-responding patients were seen as having <font color=\"#200020\">Treatment Resistant Depression<\/font>, as if this were some variant of <font color=\"#200020\">Major Depressive Disorder<\/font>, and the concept developed that the efficacy of the SSRIs could be enhanced by sequencing, combining, or augmenting the therapeutic power of these drugs using some algorithm or treatment guideline. I don&#8217;t know how this idea came into being, but I know where. It was in Texas at UT Southwestern, and was implemented as <strong><font color=\"#200020\">TMAP<\/font><\/strong> [the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Texas_Medication_Algorithm_Project\">Texas Medication Algorithm Project<\/a>], followed by a series of NIMH funded Clinical Trials [and others], looking for ways to improve the efficacy of these drugs:<\/div>\n<div align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"300\" border=\"0\" width=\"400\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/prefer-4.gif\" \/><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\">These studies cost the NIMH well over $50 M, produced hundred of articles, are mentioned in 125 posts on this blog, and came to naught. Here&#8217;s the conclusion to my last post on STAR*D [<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2014\/07\/20\/retire-the-side\/\">retire the side&hellip;<\/a>]:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\"><em><font color=\"#200020\">These attempts to turn clinical psychiatry into algorithms for  medications driven by symptoms, often gathered by questionnaires, have  yielded nothing. Worse, they trivialize both the human experience of  patients and the practitioners&#8217; efforts to help them. Let&#8217;s hope that  the chart up there has finally run out of iterations and we can retire  the side&#8230;<\/font><\/em><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\">The STAR*D dataset is available for other uses from the NIMH, and recently several independent investigations have appeared that make interesting use of the data from this large cohort:<\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\" class=\"big\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/25451401\">Depression is not a consistent syndrome: An investigation of unique symptom patterns in the STAR*D study <\/a><\/div>\n<div align=\"center\" class=\"small\">by Eiko I. Fried and Randolph M. Nesse<\/div>\n<div align=\"center\" class=\"middle\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Journal of Affective Disorders<\/font><\/strong>. 2014 172C:96-102.<\/div>\n<p>          <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Background<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: The  DSM-5 encompasses a wide range of symptoms for Major Depressive  Disorder [MDD]. Symptoms are commonly added up to sum-scores, and  thresholds differentiate between healthy and depressed individuals. The  underlying assumption is that all patients diagnosed with MDD have a  similar condition, and that sum-scores accurately reflect the severity  of this condition. To test this assumption, we examined the number of  DSM-5 depression symptom patterns in the &ldquo;Sequenced Treatment  Alternatives to Relieve Depression&rdquo; [STAR*D] study.<\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Methods<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: We  investigated the number of unique symptom profiles reported by 3703  depressed outpatients at the beginning of the first treatment stage of  STAR*D.<\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Results<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: Overall, we  identified 1030 unique symptom profiles. Of these profiles, 864 profiles  [83.9%] were endorsed by five or fewer subjects, and 501 profiles  [48.6%] were endorsed by only one individual. The most common symptom  profile exhibited a frequency of only 1.8%. Controlling for overall  depression severity did not reduce the amount of observed heterogeneity.<\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Limitations<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: Symptoms  were dichotomized to construct symptom profiles. Many subjects enrolled  in STAR*D reported medical conditions for which prescribed medications  may have affected symptom presentation.<\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Conclusions<\/font><\/strong><\/u>: The  substantial symptom variation among individuals who all qualify for one  diagnosis calls into question the status of MDD as a specific  consistent syndrome and offers a potential explanation for the  difficulty in documenting treatment efficacy. We suggest that the  analysis of individual symptoms, their patterns, and their causal  associations will provide insights that could not be discovered in  studies relying on only sum-scores.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\">It&#8217;s not easy to see what they did from the abstract and the full paper isn&#8217;t on-line, but here&#8217;s the gist of it. They looked at the intake QID-16 screening metric [<font color=\"#200020\">Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptoms<\/font>] and fractionated it into 12 Symptoms that correlated with the <font color=\"#200020\">DSM-IV Major Depressive Disorder<\/font> criteria:<\/div>\n<div align=\"center\" class=\"small\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"254\" border=\"0\" width=\"300\" vspace=\"5\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/eiko-1.gif\" \/><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\">Each item on the QID-16 is scored 0 to 4. They coded each symptom as <font color=\"#200020\">absent<\/font> [score 0 or1] or <font color=\"#200020\">present<\/font> [score 2 or 3]. That gave them a way to reclassify the 3703 subjects by twelve symptom profile. Here&#8217;s the punchline:<\/div>\n<div align=\"center\" class=\"small\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" width=\"375\" vspace=\"5\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/eiko-2.gif\" \/><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\">There was a striking heterogeneity of symptom profiles among this large cohort of patients diagnosed as having the <font color=\"#200020\">DSM-IV Major Depressive Disorder<\/font>. Striking! To my way of thinking, this simple study is totally brilliant. My only question about this paper is <em>Why hasn&#8217;t someone done this before?<\/em> They only used the intake QID-16, so they avoided the mess STAR*D became as it progressed and they started bouncing from metric to metric. And it showed something that many of us think already in a simple yet convincing way: <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Major Depressive Disorder<\/font><\/strong> is <u>not<\/u> a unitary diagnostic entity &#8211; far from it.<\/div>\n<div align=\"center\" class=\"small\"><em><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"129\" border=\"0\" width=\"375\" vspace=\"5\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/eiko-3.gif\" \/>&nbsp;<\/em><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\">I would have probably reached a slightly different conclusion &#8211; one best articulated by historian Dr. Edward Shorter in his book, <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Before-Prozac-Troubled-Disorders-Psychiatry\/dp\/0195368746\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Before Prozac<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a>:<\/div>\n<p><em> <\/em>     <\/p>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\" class=\"small\"><strong><em><font color=\"#200020\">&quot;Bottom Line: Major Depression doesn&rsquo;t exist in Nature. A political process in psychiatry created it&hellip;&quot;<\/font><\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The initial fanfare with the SSRIs introducing the Antidepressant Age [Prozac 1988] was followed by a period of disillusionment as the lower than hoped [hyped] response rates became apparent. While the logic behind what came next isn&#8217;t totally clear to me, the non-responding patients were seen as having Treatment Resistant Depression, as if this were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53607"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53643,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53607\/revisions\/53643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}