Abstract
BACKGROUND: The impact of psychiatric disorder, especially depression, on the prognosis of sarcopenic patients is gaining prominence. Yet, there have been very few studies focusing on this issue, let alone the related targeted mental health prevention. This cohort-based nested case-control study is geared to compare risk of depression and the depression-related ambulatory care utilization for sarcopenia persons with and without receiving add-on Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) treatment. AIM: To compare risk of depression and the depression-related ambulatory care utilization for sarcopenia persons with and without receiving add-on CHMs treatment. METHODS: In the beginning, we recruited those aged 20-70 years with newly diagnosed sarcopenia and free of depression between 2002 and 2010 from a nationwide insurance database. From them, we identified cases with depression onset occurring after sarcopenia until December 31, 2013. To cautiously isolate the effect of CHMs, we established the matched sets of treated and untreated subjects with CHMs use by randomly frequency matching. A conditional logistic regression was executed to explore the association of CHMs to depression risk, and the frequency and costs of depression-related ambulatory care were compared using Mann-Whitney U test. RESULTS: Addition of CHMs to routine care of sarcopenia notably correlated with a lower risk of depression. A remarkable effect of CHMs in reducing depression was detected when sarcopenia subjects received CHMs for more than three years, lowering depression risk by as much as 65%. As compared to CHMs users, the non-CHMs users indeed incurred higher frequency and costs of depression-related ambulatory care after depression attack (P < 0.05). Notably, the costs for per depression-related ambulatory care profoundly increased with the years after depression attack. CONCLUSION: Sarcopenic patients can greatly benefit from add-on CHMs treatment, underscoring the urgent need for interdisciplinary collaboration and proactive treatment planning.