ArticleBMC psychiatry2025
Maintenance pharmacotherapy after electroconvulsive therapy in inpatients with major depressive disorder: 198 prescriptions in a real-world clinical setting.
Article in BMC psychiatry, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
24 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundAlthough antidepressant monotherapy is recommended for patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), they often do not respond to it, necessitating alternatives such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). However, maintenance pharmacotherapy after ECT has remained unestablished. This study, conducted at 240 facilities throughout Japan, aimed to explore maintenance pharmacotherapy after ECT for 3,749 inpatients with MDD.
methodsThe patients were divided into two groups, one that underwent ECT (ECT group, N = 521) and another that did not (non-ECT group, N = 3,273), for the comparison of clinical characteristics and prescription details at discharge. The primary outcome of this study was the prescription rate of antidepressant monotherapy at discharge, while the secondary outcomes included prescription rates of specific combination regimens, such as antidepressant plus lithium.
resultsWe identified 198 prescription patterns involving antidepressants in the ECT group. Analysis by drug category revealed distinctive patterns: there was no statistically significant difference in prescription rates for antidepressant monotherapy between the ECT and non-ECT groups (N = 118, 22.6% vs. N = 932, 28.4%). In contrast, the prescription rate for the combination of antidepressant and antipsychotic medications was significantly higher in the ECT group (N = 188, 36.0% vs. N = 941, 28.7%). The combination of antidepressant and mood stabilizer was also more frequent in the ECT group (N = 35, 6.7% vs. N = 130, 3.9%), although this difference did not reach statistical significance after Bonferroni correction. At the drug level, additional distinctive patterns emerged: among antidepressant monotherapies, nortriptyline use was significantly more common in the ECT group (N = 9, 1.7% vs. N = 11, 0.3%). For mood stabilizers, restricting the analysis to lithium revealed a markedly higher rate in the ECT group (N = 30, 5.7% vs. N = 35, 1.0%).
conclusionsThese findings highlight the complexity of treatment decisions managing of MDD after ECT and emphasize the need for structured prospective research on the effectiveness of specific maintenance pharmacotherapies after ECT.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.