Personality traits predict treatment outcome of an antidepressant in untreated adolescents with depression: An 8-week, open-label, flexible-dose study.

Background: Antidepressant response in adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) is probably influenced by personality dimensions. However, personality dimensions in depression and their association with antidepressant treatment in adolescents are relatively unknown. We sought to investigate whether personality traits (PTs) can influence antidepressant treatment response in adolescents with depression.

Methods: Eighty-two adolescents with MDD who had completed the 8 weeks of treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) were enrolled. The Revised NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI-R) was used to measure their personality at baseline, and the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD-17) and Children's Depression Rating Scale-Revised (CDRS-R) were used to evaluate depressive symptoms at baseline and 8 weeks. Moreover, logistic regression was performed to investigate the relationship between personality dimensions and antidepressant response. Receiver operating characteristic analyses were employed to determine the accuracy of a PT-based model in predicting the antidepressant response rate.

Results: Adolescents with MDD had significantly different PTs at baseline. Multivariable logistic regression analysis showed that extroversion scores were associated with response to antidepressant treatment, the lower the extroversion score, the better the response to antidepressant treatment, after correcting for variables with significant differences and trends or all potential confounding variables. It was also found that the combination of disease duration, extraversion-gregariousness, and agreeableness-trust effectively predicted antidepressant response in adolescents with MDD, with a sensitivity of 79.4 % and specificity of 68.7 %.

Conclusion: Personality dysfunction in adolescents is associated with MDD. The antidepressant treatment response is influenced by the degree of extroversion in adolescents with MDD.