The feasibility and effectiveness of brief interventions to prevent depression in older subjects: a systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To explore the feasibility and effectiveness of brief interventions to prevent depression in older subjects. METHOD: MEDLINE, PsycINFO and HealthStar were searched for potentially relevant articles published from January 1966 to June 2003, January 1974 to June 2003 and January 1975 to June 2003, respectively. The bibliographies of relevant articles were searched for additional references. Ten studies met the following five inclusion criteria: original research, subjects mean age 50 years or more, controlled trial of a brief (<12 weeks) intervention to prevent depression, determination of depression status 12 months or more after enrolment, use of an acceptable definition of depression. The validity of studies was assessed according to six criteria. To examine feasibility we tabulated study enrolment, completion and compliance rates. To examine effectiveness we tabulated differences in depression symptom outcome scores between intervention and control groups or, when possible, absolute (ARR) and relative (RRR) risk reductions for depression. RESULTS: Only two of the ten trials met all of the validity criteria. Study enrolment rates were 21 to 100% (median 72.5%); study completion rates were 46% to 100% (median 85%); compliance rates were 29% to 100% (median 87%). Five of the ten trials had positive results: in two trials there were statistically significant differences in depression symptom outcome scores favoring the intervention group; in three trials ARRs were 2.3% to 45% (median 17%); RRRs were 45% to 71% (median 61%). CONCLUSIONS: Some types of brief interventions appear to have the potential to prevent depression in older subjects. Despite the methodologic limitations of the trials and this systematic review, these findings may guide efforts to develop and evaluate brief interventions to prevent depression in this population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".