Abstract
Background/Aims Adolescent depression is common and leads to many negative personal, social, and economic consequences for youth and their families; unfortunately, most youth who experience major depression do not receive any treatment. Depression prevention programs can reduce these negative consequences, but they must be affordable to be widely disseminated and useful for health care systems. Decision-makers need to weigh relative costs and benefits of providing efficacious prevention programs to depressed adolescents, but little cost-effectiveness analysis exists. The Prevention of Depression trial (POD) was a brief prevention program that compared a group cognitive- behavioral preventive (CBP) intervention to usual care (UC) to reduce depression risk in at-risk youth; the intervention decreased the number of days with depression. We present an incremental cost- effectiveness analysis of the group CBP program relative to UC, from the societal perspective, for 9 months following the intervention.
Methods POD was conducted in four U.S. academic and community clinics. Participants were 316 youth aged 13–17 with a past history of depression and/or current elevated, but sub-diagnostic, depressive symptoms. They were randomly assigned to the CBP group consisting of 8 weekly, 90- minute group sessions followed by 6 monthly continuation sessions or to UC alone. The main clinical outcome measures were depression-free days (DFD) and quality-adjusted life-years based on DFD (DFD-QALYs). Costs of intervention, non-protocol services, and families were included.
Results CBP achieved 13 additional DFD (p=.008), 0.022 more DFD-QALYs (p=.008). CBP cost $591 (SD=286) on average. Cost per DFD was $59 (ICER = $59; 95% CI: 11–263), $35,434 per DFD-QALY (ICER=$35,434; 95% CI: 6,350 – 157,594). Cost-effectiveness acceptability curve analyses suggest a 69% probability that CBP is more cost-effective at a willingness to pay of $50,000 per QALY. CBP had a higher net benefit for youth whose parent’s depression was in remission at baseline.
Discussion The societal cost-effectiveness of POD is comparable to or better than that of many health care services currently covered under most insurance programs. The program is particularly cost effective for the sub-group of youth whose parent’s depression was in remission at baseline.
