Treating Subthreshold Depression in Primary Care: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Behavioral Activation With Mindfulness.

PURPOSE: We undertook a randomized controlled trial to assess the efficacy of group-based behavioral activation with mindfulness (BAM) for treating subthreshold depression in primary care in Hong Kong. METHODS: We recruited adult patients aged 18 years or older with subthreshold depression from public primary care clinics and randomly assigned them to a BAM intervention group or a usual care group. The BAM group was provided with eight 2-hour weekly BAM sessions by trained allied health care workers. Patients in the usual care group received usual medical care with no additional psychological interventions. The primary outcome was depressive symptoms measured by the Beck Depression Inventory-II at 12 months. Secondary outcomes included incidence of major depressive disorder at 12 months. We assessed quality of life, activity and circumstances change, functional impairment, and anxiety at baseline, end of intervention, 5 months, and 12 months. RESULTS: We randomly allocated 115 patients to the BAM intervention and 116 patients to usual care. At 12 months, compared with usual care peers, BAM patients had a slightly more favorable change in levels of depressive symptoms on the Beck Depression Inventory-II (between-group mean difference in score = -3.85; 95% CI, -6.36 to -1.34; Cohen d = -0.46, 95% CI, -0.76 to -0.16). Incidence of major depressive disorder was lower with BAM (10.8% vs 26.8%, P = .01), whereas groups did not differ significantly on other secondary outcomes at 12 months. CONCLUSIONS: Group BAM appears to be efficacious for decreasing depressive symptoms and reducing the incidence of major depression among patients with subthreshold depression in primary care, although generalizability of our findings may be limited.

The effectiveness of group-based behavioral activation in the treatment of depression: An updated meta-analysis of randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Depression is a common mental health problem associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Amongst various psychological treatments for depression, individual behavioral activation (BA) has been shown to be effective and relatively simple in its delivery by health care providers although its effectiveness as a group based intervention requires further evidence. The objective of this study is to evaluate and update on the effectiveness of group-based BA to relieve symptoms of depression. METHODS: A meta-analysis was performed and prospective randomized trials were systematically searched from the OVID databases. The trials comparing group-based BA intervention versus usual care or waitlist controls were included. Depressive symptom measured by various validated scales was the primary outcome. As the interventions can be heterogeneous across the included studies, all analyses were performed by random-effects model. RESULTS: Seven randomized control trials were identified from the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden and Iran from 2003 to 2013. A total of 240 subjects were randomly assigned to group-based BA, and all participants included met the criteria for moderate to severe depression at baseline with the majority of participants being females. Participants who joined the group-based BA showed lower depressive symptoms (MD of BDI-II: -6.06 (95% CI: -8.28 to -3.85 and MD of HRSD: -2.82 (95% CI: -4.62 to -1.02)) than participants randomized to the control group with usual treatment. The group-based BA also showed significant reduction in anxiety level (MD of BAI: -3.66 (95% CI: -6.11 to -1.22)) but not quality of life according to two studies. Risk of bias was evident amongst the studies as blinding of health providers and patients were not feasible in psychological studies. CONCLUSIONS: Group-based behavioral activation remains promising in relieving depressive symptoms for people with moderate to severe depression from this meta-analysis. Future studies should be higher quality research with larger sample size, longer follow-up periods, and synchronized clinical outcome measures. Patient feedback for group-based behavioral activation can also be further evaluated in order to ensure long term satisfaction and usage in health services.