Telephone-Delivered Collaborative Care for Treating Post-CABG Depression: A Randomized Controlled Trial

CONTEXT Depressive symptoms commonly follow coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery and are associated with less positive clinical outcomes. OBJECTIVE To test the effectiveness of telephone-delivered collaborative care for post-CABG depression vs usual physician care. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Single-blind effectiveness trial at 7 university-based and community hospitals in or near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Participants were 302 post-CABG patients with depression (150, intervention; 152, usual care) and a comparison group of 151 randomly sampled post-CABG patients without depression recruited between March 2004 and September 2007 and observed as outpatients until June 2008. INTERVENTION Eight months of telephone-delivered collaborative care provided by nurses working with patients' primary care physicians and supervised by a psychiatrist and primary care physician from this study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Mental health–related quality of life (HRQL) measured by the Short Form-36 Mental Component Summary (SF-36 MCS) at 8-month follow-up; secondary outcome measures included assessment of mood symptoms (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression [HRS-D]), physical HRQL (SF-36 PCS), and functional status (Duke Activity Status Index [DASI]); and hospital readmissions. RESULTS The intervention patients reported greater improvements in mental HRQL (all P ≤ .02) (SF-36 MCS: Δ, 3.2 points; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.5-6.0), physical functioning (DASI: Δ, 4.6 points; 95% CI, 1.9-7.3), and mood symptoms (HRS-D: Δ, 3.1 points; 95% CI, 1.3-4.9); and were more likely to report a 50% or greater decline in HRS-D score from baseline (50.0% vs 29.6%; number needed to treat, 4.9 [95% CI, 3.2-10.4]) than usual care patients (P