Confirmatory data
Commenting on the findings for Medscape Medical News, Georgios Petrides, MD, associate professor of psychiatry, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, East Garden City, New York, noted that differences in response to ECT between patients with psychotic depression and those with nonpsychotic depression are “well known.”
However, “it’s actually good to present more data that confirm what people are doing in clinical practice,” said Petrides, who was not involved with the research.
Petrides noted that some guidelines recommend ECT as first-line treatment for psychotic depression.
“For nonpsychotic depression, we’d try medications, psychotherapy, and everything else first,” he said. He noted that the current results are “a good replication of what is known so far.”
As to why ECT should be more effective for patients with psychotic depression, he said, “A lot of people think that the biology of psychotic depression is different from the biology of nonpsychotic depression.”
Petrides added.
That ECT is more effective in psychotic depression is an “indirect point of evidence” to support that theory.
One aspect that has traditionally dogged the use of ECT has been the stigma that surrounds the procedure, Petrides noted. That’s “always an issue, but it’s getting less and less over time,” he said.
He added that ECT is extremely safe and that it is associated with the “lowest mortality for any procedure performed under general anesthesia,” which helps to reduce the stigma around it, he noted.
The study authors and Petrides have reported no relevant financial relationships.
This article first appeared on Medscape.com.