ArticleNPJ digital medicine2026
Effectiveness of AI and rule-based conversational agents for depression, anxiety and stress: A meta-analysis.
Article in NPJ digital medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Depression, anxiety, and stress are significant global health burdens worsened by restricted access to care. Conversational agents (CAs), encompassing both AI(Artificial Intelligence)- and rule-based systems, provide scalable mental health interventions. This systematic review and meta-analysis analyzed the efficacy of CA interventions in 48 randomized controlled trials covering 28,071 participants. It demonstrated small-to-moderate but significant effects in minimizing symptoms of depression (SMD: -0.27), anxiety (SMD: -0.20), and stress (SMD: -0.26). A Robust Variance Estimation (RVE) approach was used to address within-study dependencies, with results consistent with the random-effects model. Subgroup analyses investigated sources of heterogeneity and indicated greater effects in clinical populations and shorter-duration interventions. Meta-regression identified no appreciable effect of outcome timing. Risk of bias was largely low, although some studies had issues due to missing data or selective reporting. Publication bias was negligible. These results provide evidence for the utilization of conversational agents as effective interventions for lessening psychological symptoms. Additional research is required to evaluate their long-term effectiveness and how best to integrate them into mental healthcare systems.
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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.