Adjunctive Testosterone for Women with Major Depression?

Since large percentages of depressed patients, especially women, do not respond to adequate doses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, clinicians await effective adjunctive treatments. Several small, randomized, controlled trials have suggested that adjunctive low-dose testosterone can benefit depressive symptoms, vigor, and libido in hypogonadal men with treatment-resistant depression and in women with oophorectomy histories or hypopituitarism. The current researchers — who previously found benefit with a testosterone patch for women with treatment-resistant depression in a small open trial — enrolled 101 women (mean age, 47) in a two-site, double-blind, 8-week trial in which patients …