Sermo Category Report: About 30% of patients suffer from depression

SermoMay 6 2010

Sermo (http://www.sermo.com/client), the world's largest online community for physicians, today announced a Sermo Category Report titled Antidepressant Treatment Behaviors.  The report surveyed more than 200 primary care physicians and covers a variety of topics including product choice drivers, treatment paths, referring habits, and overall issues in depression management.  According to physician respondents, about 30% of their patients suffer from depression, and of those patients, 20% are taking atypical antipsychotics.

"We were surprised to see how many patients were described by PCPs as suffering from depression," said Dr. Adam Sharp, Chief Medical Officer at Sermo. "Given such high numbers, PCPs have developed more and more sophisticated treatment paths for their patients. This report details first, second and third-line treatments and dives into topics ranging from the most successful medications to changing referral habits."

Key highlights from the report include:

• Majority of PCP's treat 61% or more of their mild-to-moderate depression patients with antidepressants and 91% or more of their severe patients with antidepressants.
• When first-line treatment is not successful, most physicians try increasing the dose of the prescribed drug before they consider changing the drug taken.
• Early in the treatment path, switching antidepressants is more common than adding adjunctive therapy.  Adding overtakes switching later in treatment, when more options have been exhausted.
• Compliance, side effects, efficacy and cost/coverage are the biggest issues physicians face when treating depression patients.

The full 40-page PPT document includes demographics of surveyed physicians as well as detailed analysis of medications and issues facing effective depression treatment.  

Drugs and Medications highlighted in this report:  Lexapro (Forest Laboratories), Celexa (Forest Pharmaceuticals), Zoloft (Pfizer), Prozac (Lilly), Paxil (GlaxoSmithKline), Effexor (Pfizer), Cymbalta (Lilly), Abilify (Otsuka America Pharmaceutical/Bristol-Myers Squibb), Seroquel (AstraZeneca), Elavil, Risperdal (Janssen)