An examination of the relationship between non-depression-related costs and uninterrupted Tx

Depression is an important disease for many managed care organizations and can be one of the largest cost drivers in their drug budget. A number of st udies have focused on the cost impact of antidepressant treatment. One prev iously published study showed that significant savings in office-based serv ice costs was likely in patients who completed at least 6 months of antidep ressant therapy. The purpose of this study was to determine if these result s could be replicated in another managed care population. The methodology f rom the previously published study was adopted as a framework for this anal ysis. No analyses in the cur rent study demonstrated that uninterrupted ant idepressant treatment was associated with a large reduction in non-depressi on-related costs.