Objective assessment of the therapy effectiveness for patients with depression based on the analysis of their involuntary reactions during a combined psychodiagnostic and psychophysiological study

Abstract

The aim of this work was the development a method for objective assessment of therapy effectiveness for patients with depression based on measurements of reaction time and other parameters of involuntary response to audiovisual stimuli in the process of combined psychodiagnostic and psychophysiological investidation. 97 patients with depression (main group) were examined, at an average age of 40.94 ± 1.25 years (among them 51 persons diagnosed with “depressive episode” (F32 by ICD-10) and 46 persons with “recurrent depressive disorder” (F33 by ICD-10), as well as 64 almost healthy individuals (control group), at age 41.21 ± 1.21 years. Clinical-psychopathological, psychometric (computer versions of: Zung’s scales, HADS, Spielberger tests in Khanina modification, AUDIT and SCL-90R), and psychophysiological methods were used, the latter method involved the use of software and hardware complex "Reocom-stress" (manufacturer: " XAI-MEDICA", Kharkiv, Ukraine) in the "Attitude to the topic" mode with registration of psychophysiological response to groups of questions (thematic groups) from the above-mentioned psychometric methods. The described procedure was used twice during the study: with an interval of 17-19 days. It was shown that the response time and other parameters of involuntary response to audiovisual stimuli are valuable sources of information for quality control of the therapy effectiveness for patients with depression. And three channels of information (scale scores, and response time to questions in psychodiagnostic investigation and attitude to the topics (the questions of the mentioned scales), and assessed by the results of psychophysiological research) are relatively independent of each other and carry additional information about the mental status of the respondents. We found out that the channel of mental chronometry is the most sensitive to residual depressive symptoms. It has been proven that the best choice for objective assessment of therapy effectiveness for patients with depression is a computer version of the Zung’s scale with registration of the response time to each questions of this scale. This approach has the highest diagnostic properties (sensitivity — 86.60%, specificity — 96.88% and accuracy — 90.68%), which, together with the simplicity of implementation, makes it quite suitable for practical use.