Depression is a chronic illness whose true costs to society are unclear. The costs associated with depression are direct (drugs and treatment), indirect (absenteeism and loss of productivity), and intangible (quality of life). Direct costs are usually easy to quantify. Indirect costs often test the ingenuity of researchers whose results are, at best, crude approximations. Intangible costs are elusive and may never be measured with any degree of accuracy. To compound matters further, many patients with depression have never been diagnosed, which complicates the cost accounting analysis of depression from a societal perspective. What is clear is that the worldwide costs of depression are climbing The overall costs of treating depression attributable to drug therapy are modest. The appropriate choice of antidepressant therapy is likely to be the product that provides the highest effectiveness in terms of overall costs. As a result, it is important that prescribers have an idea of the benefit derived from the cost of drugs, and how the cost effectiveness of different drugs compare.

Previous studies of antidepressant cost effectiveness have suggested that the use of venlafaxine, which costs more than generic selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), may be no more costly when total costs (eg, how many drugs were prescribed, how many medical or emergency room visits patients had, and how often they were hospitalized) are calculated. The objectives of this retrospective, populationbased, database study were to identify patient characteristics and factors associated with the choice of antidepressant in order to assess differences in persistence, healthcare utilization, and direct medical costs associated with venlafaxine and SSRI pharmacotherapy.

Study results indicated that in this real-world setting, medical costs were similar among depressive patients treated with venlafaxine and SSRIs. The higher purchase price of venlafaxine was balanced by cost savings due to fewer hospitalizations and fewer outpatient medical visits. Differences in drug treatment may also partially explicate the observed differences in average direct medical costs between venlafaxine and SSRIs.