Am J Psychiatry 1990; 147:1488-1492
Copyright © 1990 by American Psychiatric Association
Value of the DST for predicting response of patients with major depression to hospitalization and desipramine
JC Nelson, CM Mazure and PI Jatlow
Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06510.
The authors examined the value of the dexamethasone suppression test (DST)
for predicting response of patients with unipolar, nonpsychotic major
depression to 1 week of hospitalization without antidepressant drugs and to
a 4-week trial of desipramine at a fixed plasma level. The rates of
response to hospitalization without drug treatment (defined as a score of
12 or less on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression) were not
significantly different for the patients with a positive DST and those with
a negative DST. This finding differs from those of prior studies of the DST
and response to placebo. The responses of the DST- positive and
DST-negative patients to desipramine also did not differ, a finding that
replicates those in some prior reports.
