A comparison of characteristics of depressed patients and efficacy of sertraline and amitriptyline between Japan and the West

Grapefruit juice alters plasma sertraline levels after single ingestion of sertraline in healthy volunteers

“…Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are one of the most popular classes of drugs for treating depression or anxiety disorders. Sertraline, a widely used SSRI, is indicated for the treatment of major depressive disorders and some anxiety disorders in Japan (Ohishi and Kamijima 2002;Kamijima et al 2006). It undergoes extensive first-pass oxidation (via demethylation) in the liver, to form desmethylsertraline, which accumulates to a greater concentration than the parent drug at steady-state.…”

Cross‐cultural equivalence in depression assessment: Japan–Europe–North American study

“…Our approach is important because preliminary analyses of the current data sets suggested that simple‐minded EFA of Japanese, European and North American patients led to different factor solutions, just as different as the foregoing studies on the factor structure of the HRSD discussed in the (2–6). To our own astonishment, randomly selected subgroups from the same population yielded, again, just as different factor solutions, even when we retained 200–500 patients in the sample and employed the same analytic and rotation methods.…”

“…Curiously enough, however, the symptomatological structure of major depression as measured with this ‘gold standard’ HRSD has reportedly been quite variable even within one nation and one culture (1). Even limiting oneself to studies which employed modern operational diagnostic criteria, which analyzed the core 17 items of the HRSD, and which had more than 100 patients to allow reliable estimates of underlying factors, we find proposals of three (2), four (1, 3), and five factors (4–6). It is further perplexing to note that substantively different combinations of items are listed even when researchers extracted the same number of factors.…”

“…Three samples of Japanese, European and North American patients were each randomly divided into four groups. We used the first three groups for the first purpose to find out candidate factor structures corresponding with 3‐, 4‐ or 5‐factor structures reported in the literature (2–6), and then used the remaining group for the second purpose, namely to see how well these candidates perform and to determine the maximally informative structure for the scale.…”

False beliefs: The current treatment of patients with depression

“…Data show that patients with depression are very similar across cultures for most symptoms, and the type of symptoms experienced is very limited no matter the multiple causes stressed by each culture [16,17]. With all of the different possible expressions of a "normal" individual in the context of different cultures, these similarities do not favor a "normal" individual response to the enormous variety of stressors.…”