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Biomedical subjects

L A Uebelacker

Publications and source records attributed to L A Uebelacker.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Patterns of axis I comorbidity in early-onset versus late-onset major depressive disorder.

BACKGROUND: This study of a large clinical sample of depressed patients examined whether childhood onset as compared with adult onset Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) would confer a greater risk for Axis I comorbidity and whether childhood onset MDD would also differ from adult onset MDD in the pattern of comorbid disorders. METHODS: We examined lifetime co-occurrence of Axis I disorders among 381 adult outpatients with MDD by Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R-Patient Edition (SCID-P). Subjects were divided into childhood onset (n = 47), adolescent onset (n = 101) and adult onset (n = 233) MDD groups. RESULTS: We found that the two early-onset groups exhibited significantly increased rates of Axis I comorbidity. The childhood onset group accounted for a disproportionately high percentage of depressed adults with two or more comorbid Axis I disorders. Social and simple phobias and alcohol abuse/dependence were significantly more prevalent among individuals with childhood onset MDD than among individuals with adult onset MDD. Alcohol abuse/dependence, but not anxiety disorders, was significantly more prevalent among adolescent onset than adult onset MDD groups. Panic, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive and somatoform disorders were equally distributed across MDD onset groups. Comorbid disorders were much more likely to have followed onset of MDD among individuals with childhood compared with adult onset, except for social phobia which more frequently preceded the depression. The relative ordering among the comorbid conditions with respect to whether they followed or preceded MDD did not vary notably across the three age of onset groups. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that early-onset MDD is associated with an increased density of Axis I comorbidity that seems to be limited to specific disorders.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Major depressive subtypes and treatment response.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between depressive subtypes and response to fluoxetine treatment in a large cohort of outpatients. We studied 294 outpatients with major depressive disorder who were then treated with fluoxetine 20 mg/day for 8 weeks. Treatment outcome was evaluated with the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS)-17, the Clinical Global Impressions-Severity, and with the HDRS-8; the latter is proposed to be a relatively more specific measure of depression severity than the HDRS-17. We assessed the relationships between degree of treatment response and several depressive subtypes (melancholic, atypical, hostile, and anxious depression, double depression, and depression with comorbid personality disorders), after adjusting for baseline depression severity. We found that nonanxious depressives (patients without any comorbid anxiety disorder) improved slightly but significantly more during treatment than anxious depressives on all outcome measures. Melancholic depression was associated with slightly less improvement on the HDRS-17 only, whereas the other subtypes of depression were not associated with differences in treatment outcome.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Social phobia, avoidant personality disorder and atypical depression: co-occurrence and clinical implications.

BACKGROUND: Increasing attention has been directed in recent years to the detection and treatment of psychiatric co-morbidity among depressed individuals. The overlap of social phobia (SP) and avoidant personality disorder (APD) has been well recognized and a relationship between these disorders and depression has been suggested. METHODS: The pattern and clinical implications of co-morbidity of SP and APD with major depressive disorder (MDD), diagnosed by DSM-III-R criteria, were studied among 243 out-patients presenting with depression. RESULTS: Overall, 26.7% of adults in our sample with MDD met criteria for SP and 28.4% for APD. Almost two-thirds of depressed adults meeting criteria for social phobia or avoidant personality disorder met criteria for both (SP+APD). Depressed adults who met criteria for both SP+APD exhibited a significantly higher proportion of atypical depression (54.8%) compared with those with neither SP nor APD (31.1%). Among depressed patients, the co-occurrence of SP with APD was also associated with an earlier age of onset of MDD, a greater number of comorbid Axis I diagnoses, and greater impairment of social adjustment and assertiveness. CONCLUSIONS: Results confirm the overlap of SP and APD in a depressed population and the high prevalence of these disorders in MDD. They suggest that depressed individuals with both SP and APD but not SP alone are at particularly high risk for atypical depression and for social dysfunction in excess of that caused by a current major depression.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

The Mini-Mental State Examination among adult outpatients with major depressive disorder.

One hundred forty-eight patients, ages 18-65, with major depression were administered the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) prior to 8 weeks of treatment with fluoxetine; 75 of these patients were readministered the MMSE following treatment. MMSE scores were not related to pretreatment severity of depression or to reported concentration problems and were not predictive of antidepressant response. Non- and partial responders had lower posttreatment MMSE scores than responders, men had lower posttreatment scores than women, and subjects over 50 had lower pretreatment scores than younger subjects, although in all cases, the magnitude of the differences was small and unlikely to be clinically important. Our results suggest that while the MMSE has been shown to be useful among geriatric and other depressed inpatients, it is not a sensitive indicator of depression severity, concentration problems, or likelihood of treatment response among otherwise healthy adults with major depression in an outpatient setting.

Adolescent↗