Practical application of digital therapeutics in people with mood disorders

Abstract

Digital therapeutics (DTx) offer evidence-based digitally-delivered high quality standards applications and/or softwares in the prevention, management and treatment of several medical conditions, including mood disorders. Nowadays, there are only three DTx officially approved by the Food and Drug Administration for mental conditions and there are still very few DTx developed in the context of mood disorders. The current comprehensive overview aims at providing a summary of currently published studies on DTx clinical applications in major depressive disorder (MDD), depressive symptomatology and bipolar disorder (BD), by using PubMed/MEDLINE and Scopus databases. Fifteen studies have been selected (10 on DTx in depressive symptomatology and/or MDD; 4 on BD; 1 on MDD and BD). Literature on DTx in mood disorders is still lacking, being mostly constituted by feasibility and acceptability rather than efficacy/effectiveness outcomes, particularly in BD. More studies focused on MDD compared to BD. Most DTx on MDD have been developed based on cognitive behaviour therapy interventions while on BD are based on psychoeducation. All studies assessing symptom severity improvement pre- vs. postinterventions demonstrated a significant postintervention improvement. Therefore, despite the preliminary encouraging results of studies here retrieved, their methodology is still too heterogeneous to allow comparisons and the generalizability of their findings. Further studies are warranted, in more larger samples involving multiple sites, including measures of both specific symptom effects as well as acceptability, feasibility and effectiveness in the real-world settings.