Does Treatment for Depression With Collaborative Care Improve the Glycemic Levels in Diabetic Patients with Depression? A Systematic Review

Diabetes is a chronic disease with a high prevalence in the United States. If not treated adequately, it can have serious complications. Furthermore, when depression affects concomitantly, adherence to treatment can be decreased. Therefore, a cascade of complications may develop, affecting the quality of life and increasing the risk of death. Depression is underdiagnosed in patients with diabetes, and even if diagnosed, the treatment for both diabetes and depression is not well established in primary care. This study aims to evaluate if treatment for depression with collaborative care can improve glycemic levels and depression treatment response in diabetic patients with depression. As well, we will investigate if treatment with antidepressants will aid in improving glycemic levels. For this systematic review, we followed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines and used PubMed, PubMed Central, and MEDLINE as database. Keywords: "diabetes improvement with depression treatment'. For collaborative care intervention, we selected three systematic reviews and meta-analysis. These three studies gave us a total of 1637 patients evaluated for the glycemic outcome and 1793 patients for depression outcomes. For the intervention with antidepressants, we included two articles. One systematic review and meta-analysis that evaluated the effect of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on glycemic levels and the second article involved was a systematic review that assessed the effect of antidepressants on glycemia. A total of 4119 diabetic patients taking antidepressants were evaluated for glucose levels of the outcome. For the collaborative care outcome: two of the three studies showed non-significant improvement of glycemic levels with intervention. However, one study that had a bigger sample size exhibited significant improvement of glycemia with collaborative care. It is necessary to elaborate on new studies to confirm this finding. For the glycemic outcome with antidepressants: SSRIs improve glycemic levels. This class of antidepressants is the most studied, and it would be interesting to perform trials comparing different classes of antidepressants with a bigger sample size and run for a more extended period. According to our review, collaborative care improves glycemia and depression treatment response. At the same time, it improves the adherence to treatment of both oral hypoglycemic drugs and antidepressants. SSRIs demonstrated to be more effective in glycemic control. The most studied and effective SSRIs are fluoxetine, escitalopram, and citalopram.