For older adults with clinical depression that has not responded to standard treatments, adding the drug aripiprazole (brand name Abilify) to an antidepressant they’re already taking is more effective than switching from one antidepressant to another, according to a new multicenter study led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Aripiprazole originally was approved by the FDA in 2002 as a treatment for schizophrenia but also has been used in lower doses as an add-on treatment for clinical depression in younger patients who do not respond to antidepressants alone.
The new findings are published March 3 in The New England Journal of Medicine and are to be presented that same day by Eric J. Lenze, MD — principal investigator and head of the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University — and colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry in New Orleans.
Many people with clinical depression don’t respond to medications used to treat the condition. Consequently, some doctors switch such patients to different antidepressants in the pursuit of finding one that works, while other physicians may prescribe another class of drugs to see if a combination of medications helps.
Both strategies have been recommended by experts as options for older adults with treatment-resistant depression. However, the new study was designed to help determine which strategy is most effective. Augmenting an antidepressant with aripiprazole helped 30% of patients with treatment-resistant depression, compared to only 20% who were switched to another solo antidepressant, results of the study show.
“Often, unless a patient responds to the first treatment prescribed for depression, physicians follow a pattern in which they try one treatment after another until they land on an effective medication,” said Lenze, the Wallace and Lucille Renard Professor and the study’s corresponding author. “It would be beneficial to have an evidence-based strategy we can rely on to help patients feel better as quickly as possible. We found that adding aripiprazole led to higher rates of depression remission and greater improvements in psychological well-being — which means how positive and satisfied patients felt — and this is good news. However, even that approach helped only about 30% of people in the study with treatment-resistant depression, underscoring the need to find and develop more effective treatments that can help more people.”