Regular Research ArticleA Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Psychotherapy for Late-Life Depression
Section snippets
Search Strategy
We searched electronic databases PubMed (MESH and text), PsycInfo (title, keywords, and text), and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (MESH, keywords, title, abstract) on May 11, 2012. We used terms for the intervention (psychotherapy, counseling, therapy), the older adult population (aged, aging, elder, elderly, geriatric, late life, later life, old, older), and depression symptomatology (depressed, depression, depressive disorder). We limited the search to published, English
Characteristics of Included Studies
Our search yielded 2,706 potential articles (Fig. 1). Review of key articles, reviews, and the online psychotherapy database produced another 64 articles. We excluded 2,628 articles based on abstract, and reviewed the remaining 142 full articles. There were 13 articles cited in other reviews that were excluded because they did not meet our inclusion criteria (see Supplemental Digital Content 2, which describes these excluded trials; available online).
A total of 27 trials conducted between 1981
Conclusions
Our meta-analysis confirmed previous findings that psychotherapy is an effective treatment for depression in late life.4, 5, 6, 7 As hypothesized, the magnitude of the effect varied significantly by the type of control group. Furthermore, the effect of type of control on the SMD was relatively large compared with other factors (Table 2). Psychotherapy interventions yielded large effects when compared with waitlist and attention controls but small to moderate effects when compared with
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Supplemental digital content is available for this article in the HTML and PDF versions of this article on the journal's Web site (www.ajgponline.org).