Of the available pharmacological treatments, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the most commonly prescribed in patients with co-morbid depression (55% of the cohort with depression and diabetes) .However, there have been only a handful of randomized controlled trials assessing the role of anti-depressant drug treatment in people with diabetes and depression . All except one of these trials evaluated SSRIs (sertraline 50–200 mg/d, fluoxetine 20–40 mg/d and paroxetine 20 mg/d) and all 3 agents were found to be effective in reducing depressive symptoms relative to placebo after 10 weeks of treatment . Fluoxetine and paroxetine have been compared in a single trial, and were both equally effective. Whilst a couple of studies have reported trends to improved glycemic control with fluoxetine, only one
trial of sertraline was found to significantly improve glycemic control relative to the placebo group after 6 months of treatment. In this study, baseline HbA1c improved from 10.0% to 8.0% in the sertraline treated group versus 9.7% to 8.8% in the placebo group (p < 0.01). Aggregating sertraline data from two published trials involving 387 patients showed 85% of people with diabetes met criteria for psychiatric symptom
improvement, with full remission of clinical depression occurring in 46% of patients, following 16-weeks of treatment . The presence of diabetes complications and higher depression scores at baseline were found to be predictive of non-response to treatment . Bryan et al. compared the rates of depression remission in people with and without diabetes receiving another SSRI, citalopram (n = 235 and n = 2641, respectively).
The majority of patients received at least 40 mg/d, and was treated for ≥8 weeks irrespective of the presence of co-morbid diabetes. As is generally recognized in cases of depression associated with medical co-morbidity, rates of remission were lower for the people with diabetes.