Abstract

Objective: This study was designed to evaluate the psychiatrists’ level of recognition of somatic symptoms associated with a major depressive episode (MDE) and the treatment consequences of somatic symptoms in MDE. Methodology: This non-interventional study was conducted in 25 medical offices in Puerto Rico.; consisting of 2 visits separated by 8 weeks. The level of recognition was determined by the correlation between psychiatrists’ clinical evaluation and their patients’ self-evaluations using kappa statistics. Chi-square test was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the impact of somatic symptoms on treatment antidepressants. Results: All 145 recruited patients reported the presence of at least one somatic symptom associated with their current MDE. In both visits, a fair agreement between the psychiatrists’ and the patients’ reports was only noted for headache, abdominal pain and upper limb pains (0.4003 £ k ³ 0.6594). For other painful symptoms and painless somatic symptoms, the Kappa values obtained were nonsignificant. Slight but significant reductions in depression and painful symptoms severity were observed after 8 weeks of treatment. However, a proportional inverse relationship between the pain relief and depression severity was observed (p <0001). Conclusions: This study indicates that somatic symptoms are very common in depressed Puerto Rican patients, are significantly under reported by psychiatrists, and have a significant impact on the effectiveness of the antidepressant.