Norio Watanabe

Norio Watanabe, Department of Psychiatry and Cognitive Behavioral Medicine, Nagoya City University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Mizuho-cho, Mizuho-ku Nagoya 467-8601, Japan; norio@med.nagoya-cu.ac.jp

QUESTION

Question:

Is psychotherapy an effective way to treat children and adolescents with depression?

Outcomes:

Risk of response, defined as score below the threshold for diagnosis of depression on whichever scale the study used—“operationalized criteria” or “a validated depression severity measure”. Secondary outcomes were cost and safety of treatment.

METHODS

Design:

Systematic review with meta-analysis.

Data sources:

Cochrane CENTRAL, MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, EMBASE, PSYNDEX, LILACS, conference proceedings and hand searches of journals; performed by searching the Cochrane Collaboration Depression, Anxiety and Neurosis Registers on 17 December 2004. Additional supplementary search of CENTRAL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and EMBASE was carried out, and from the selected papers, reference lists were examined and lead authors contacted for further data on other trials.

Study selection and analysis:

Individual or cluster randomised controlled trials of any psychotherapy (PT) versus no treatment, attention-placebo, waiting-list control, or treatment as usual, in adolescents (aged 6–18 years) with depression or dysthymia. Attention-placebo was defined as interventions …