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Depression will be the disorder with the highest disease burden by 2030, and is associated with considerable personal suffering and huge economic costs. Psychotherapies are preferred by patients and are effective, but attain a limited impact on the disease burden of depression. One important way to improve this status-quo is to develop “personalized treatments”, identifying which characteristics of the patient predict the outcome of a specific therapy, so as to get a better match between the individual and the treatment received. For this, more knowledge is needed on the moderators that predict response to one treatment as compared to another. Research in this area is limited because most single trials do not have sufficient statistical power to identify moderators.

Thus, the main objectives of MATCh are collecting, systematizing and analyzing the primary data from all the trials comparing cognitive behavioral therapy, the most studied and recommended psychotherapy for depression, with other psychotherapies in order to examine moderators of outcome (”what works best for whom”). Using the methodology of “individual patient data” meta-analyses, an innovative technique integrating the results of multiple individual trials, MATCh can be expected to have a major impact on the field of psychotherapy for depression, in terms of clinical knowledge and the development of personalized treatment, and as a first step to a better understanding of how and for whom psychotherapies work. 

This project is supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation CNCS – UEFISCDI 

Project number : 244 /01.10.2015