Effectiveness of antidepressants in improving the prognosis of COVID-19: A systematic review and meta-analysis

OBJECTIVE, AND MATERIAL AND METHODS: A systematic review and meta-analysis was performed to evaluate the effectiveness of antidepressants in reducing the poor evolution of COVID-19 disease (a composite variable including death, hospitalization and need for mechanical ventilation), and mortality, according the guidelines for Systematic Reviews of Interventions published by the Cochrane library. SOURCE OF DATA: MEDLINE, EMBASE and COCHRANE LIBRARY were consulted up to February 25, 2022. Unpublished studies were searched on clinicaltrials.gov platform. SELECTION OF STUDIES: Seven masked and unmasked, observational and experimental studies evaluating death, hospitalization and need for mechanical ventilation were selected. A second subgroup analysis with mortality variable was performed. DATA EXTRACTION: A full risk of bias assessment was performed addressing issues such as information and confounding bias. ROB2 and Robins-I tools for randomized and no randomized studies were employed respectively. In the quantitative analysis, the risk of publication bias, heterogeneity, estimation of pooled measure and a sensitivity analysis was performed. The pooled final measure was calculated as odds ratio with its correspondent 95% confidence interval. A random effects model was used for this purpose due to the heterogeneity between included studies. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the robustness of final pooled measure. RESULTS: Seven studies were finally considered to calculate the final pooled measure. The effect of intervention was OR 0.73; 95% CI 0.56–0.94. CONCLUSIONS: The use of antidepressants, and specially SSRI could be effective for reducing the risk of poor progression of COVID-19 disease.