Comparative efficacy and tolerability of new-generation antidepressants for major depressive disorder in children and adolescents: an individual patient data meta-analysis

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a commonly occurring serious mental disorder, accounting for a large portion of the global burden of disease. The overall prevalence rate of depressive disorder is about 3% in children and 6% in adolescents. Depressive disorder in youth is often associated with high rates of comorbid mental disorders, functional impairment and suicide. For young people aged 10–19 years, depressive disorders are the leading cause of health-related burden, accounting for 6–10% of the disability-adjusted life-years, which are the key metric used to assess the Global Burden of Disease (GBD).
Although previous studies have provided some important findings about pharmacological treatments for children and adolescents with depressive disorders in the past decades, several questions still remain unsolved by the aggregate data from those meta-analyses. Individual participant data meta-analysis (IPD-MA) enables exploration of the impacts of individual characteristics on treatment effects, allowing matching of treatments to specifc subgroups of patients. We will perform an IPD-MA to assess the effcacy and tolerability of new-generation antidepressants for major depressive disorder in children and adolescents.