Background: Depressive disorder has gradually become one of the most commonly reported disabling psychiatric complication that occurs after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Currently classical antidepressant medications may not have the same effectiveness in patients with TBI as in patients without TBI. Non-pharmacological interventions have been considered to be effective for managing depressive symptoms or treating depressive disorder. But to date the comparative effectiveness of various types of non-pharmacological interventions has been synthesized in few studies, the evidence remains inconclusive. Thus, the purpose of this systematic review and network meta-analyses is to summarize high-quality evidence and identify the most effective non-pharmacological intervention when applied to treat the depressive disorder in patients after TBI.
Methods: The comprehensive literature search in electronic database including PubMed, Ovid Medline, Cochrane Library, Web of Science database, Embase Database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and Wanfang Data Chinese database from inception to the search date. Only high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have used non-pharmacological interventions to treat depressive disorder after TBI will be considered. Two independent reviewers will identify eligible studies, extract and manage data information, and then determine methodical quality of included studies. Overall efficacy will be assessed as primary outcome. Secondary outcomes involved treatment response, remission rate, overall acceptability, tolerability of treatment, social functioning, occurrence of adverse events, and suicide-related outcome. Cochrane risk of bias assessment tool will be adopted to assess the risk of bias. Study heterogeneity will be measured by the I statistic. Traditional pairwise meta-analyses will be performed using STATA, while WinBUGS with GeMTC package of R software will be used to carry out network meta-analysis.
Results: This systematic review will examine the relative efficacy, effectiveness, safety, tolerability and acceptability of non-pharmacological interventions, and then to identify the most effective non-pharmacological intervention for depressive disorder after TBI.
Expected conclusion: Our work could be used to give clinical recommendations for practice guideline developers, psychiatrist, neurologist, policymakers, researchers as well as individual with depressive disorder after TBI, and will also identify gaps in knowledge that could be the subject of future research.
Ethics and dissemination: Neither ethics approval nor patient informed consent is necessary since this protocol was designed based on the existing literature. The results will be disseminated electronically or in print through publications in peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Inplasy registration: INPLASY202080022.