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Combined pharmacology, psychotherapy may be most effective

In a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of psychotherapy vs. psychotropic drug treatment to help clinicians, patients and policymakers understand the field of psychiatry, researchers concluded that neither therapy showed consistent differences, but a combination of both was often powerful.

Researchers identified 45,233 systematic reviews on pharmacotherapy or psychotherapy vs. placebo, pharmacotherapy vs. psychotherapy, and their combination vs. either psychiatry model alone from a search of Medline, Embase, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Library.

After eliminating duplicate articles, researchers were left with 20,703 results; they included 61 meta-analyses on 21 psychiatric disorders. These contained 852 individual trials and 137,126 participants, according to the study

Researchers reported that the methods of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy trials were significantly different.

“Because of the multiple differences in the methods used in pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy trails, indirect comparisons of their effect sizes compared with placebo or no treatment are problematic. Well-designed direct comparisons, which was scarce, need public funding. Because patients often benefit from both forms of therapy, research should also focus on how both modalities can be best combined…rather than debate the use of one treatment over the other,” the researchers wrote.

Disclosure: See the study for a full list of researchers’ financial disclosures.