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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.

EV1158

Ten sessions of ISTDP-based supportive psychodynamic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression: a routine-care pilot study with clinical and inflammatory biomarker outcomes

TEN SESSIONS OF ISTDP-INFORMED SUPPORTIVE PSYCHODYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY IN TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION: A ROUTINE-CARE PILOT WITH CLINICAL AND INFLAMMATORY BIOMARKER OUTCOMES

Adjunctive short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy delivered in routine care reduced depressive symptoms over ten weeks, but quality of life did not improve in parallel.

The study aimed to compare baseline symptoms, quality of life (QoL), and biomarkers in patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) with those in healthy controls (HC), and to examine ten-week changes in patients receiving adjunctive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (STDP). This prospective pilot study, conducted in routine outpatient care between 2022 and 2023, included 15 patients with TRD receiving STDP and pharmacotherapy and 16 healthy controls; the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D), WHOQOL-BREF, and serum biomarkers were assessed at baseline and week 10, and within-group changes were evaluated using the paired Wilcoxon signed-rank test. At baseline, HAM-D scores differed between HC and TRD groups, at 1.8 and 20.9, respectively (p < 0.001), as did quality-of-life scores, at 60.6 and 39.4 (p < 0.001); IL-6 was higher in the TRD group (p = 0.037). At the ten-week follow-up (n = 13), HAM-D scores decreased from 21.4 to 13.2 (p = 0.002), and TNF-alpha decreased from 2.54 pg/mL to 1.79 pg/mL (p = 0.033); the response rate was reported as 38.5% and the remission rate as 30.8%. Quality of life, however, did not improve in parallel with symptom improvement over the same period. The authors characterized the elevated baseline IL-6 levels and declining TNF-alpha findings as isolated, exploratory signals rather than evidence of a broad inflammatory change. They emphasized that, as this was a single-center observational pilot study with a small sample and no treatment comparator, the findings remained hypothesis-generating, and that longer follow-up, high-sensitivity measurement methods, and domain-specific quality-of-life analyses were needed.

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