Cognitive remediation for depressed inpatients: Results of a pilot randomized controlled trial

Will your doctor be following this up with changes to your stroke depression protocol? Oh you don't have a depression protocol? FUCKING HEY, START SCREAMING AT YOUR DOCTOR FOR BEING USELESS.  Don't allow any deflection because this wasn't tested in stroke patients.
http://anp.sagepub.com/content/50/1/46.abstract? 

1. Wolfgang Trapp1⇑
2. Sinha Engel1
3. Goeran Hajak1
4. Stefan Lautenbacher2
5. Bernd Gallhofer3

1. ¹Department of Psychiatry, Sozialstiftung Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
2. ²Department of Physiological Psychology, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
3. ³Centre for Psychiatry, Justus Liebig University School of Medicine Gießen, Gießen, Germany

1. Wolfgang Trapp, Department of Psychiatry, Sozialstiftung Bamberg, St-.Getreu-Straße 18, 96049 Bamberg, Germany. Email: wolfgang.trapp@sozialstiftung-bamberg.de

Abstract

Objective: Neurocognitive deficits that persist despite antidepressive treatment and affect social and vocational functioning are well documented in major depressive disorder. Cognitive training approaches have proven successful in ameliorating these deficits in other psychiatric groups, but very few studies have been conducted in unipolar depressive patients by now. In contrast to previous studies solely including outpatients, effects of a cognitive remediation intervention on neurocognitive functioning of depressed inpatients were assessed by the present study.

Method: A randomized controlled trial was carried out with 46 depressed inpatients of a psychiatric hospital. Patients were randomly assigned to either a control group that received standard drug and non-drug (cognitive behavioural, occupational, sports, relaxation and music therapy) antidepressive treatment or a remediation group that additionally received 12 sessions of cognitive training for a total of 4 weeks (three sessions per week). An intent to treat analysis and a last observation carried forward method was used for data analyses.

Results: Patients of the remediation group demonstrated greater improvements in neurocognitive measures of verbal and nonverbal memory, working memory and executive function (Cohen’s d effect sizes between .52 and .98).

Conclusions: These results provide preliminary evidence that cognitive remediation interventions can be successfully applied also in psychiatric inpatients experiencing an acute depressive episode.