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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0791

Systematic review and meta-analysis of the sex- and age-specific effectiveness of psychotherapy for unipolar depression

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS ON THE GENDER/AGE-SPECIFIC EFFECTIVENESS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY FOR UNIPOLAR DEPRESSION

Men, and particularly patients over 60, are substantially underrepresented in depression treatment research relative to actual prevalence rates, and sex- and age-specific subgroup analyses are almost never conducted.

The study examines the extent to which (older) men are represented in research on the effectiveness of treatment for unipolar depression and whether sex and gender differences are systematically considered; the central question is whether these studies reflect real-world sex and age distributions. In this ongoing systematic review, a PICO-based search was conducted in PubMed (n = 11,026), PsycINFO (n = 6,888), and Cochrane Central (n = 5,097). After 6,597 duplicate records were removed, 16,414 records were screened and 714 reports were assessed for eligibility; to date, 564 have been excluded based on exclusion criteria and 35 because they involved multiple studies. Data have been collected from 51 studies so far, 17 of which involve psychotherapy as the intervention; RoB2 and SAGER are being used for quality assessment, and focus groups with older men with depression provide a perspective sensitive to the target population. Preliminary findings show a sex distribution of 32.2% men and 67.8% women, compared with 39.2% and 60.8%, respectively, in Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data. The mean age of the included samples is 38.6 ± 12.0 years; six studies did not report an age range, and two did not specify an upper age limit. Adults aged 60 and over account for 3.9% of participants, compared with a GBD prevalence figure of 22.6% (p<0.001, Holm-adjusted). The authors report no sex data gap in the current dataset, but identify an age data gap; although the inclusion criteria appear inclusive with respect to age, adults over 60 are underrepresented. Furthermore, the significant difference between the observed sex distribution and prevalence rates indicates a gender data gap; to date, only one record has included a sex-specific subgroup analysis, and no study has reported an age-specific subgroup analysis or one examining sex and age jointly. If these findings are confirmed, the authors recommend revising clinical guidelines to make them gender-sensitive and allocating resources for depression treatment according to need; treatment outcomes in older men remain particularly underresearched.

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