A New Smartphone App Wants To Help You Find An Antidepressant That Works
BuzzFeed - Latest 2015-08-28
Summary:
Because depression is tough, and antidepressants don’t work equally for everyone.
Anna Borges / BuzzFeed Life / Via buzzfeed.com
Depression isn't an easily quantifiable medical disorder. Defined by moods and emotional states, it's subjective and difficult to measure. And because of that, it's often tough to determine whether or not medications prescribed to treat it are working as intended.
A new smartphone app called Start aims to change that. Developed for people on newly prescribed antidepressants, the app is designed to track and summarize their response to the medication over time so that they can determine whether or not it's working.
Available for download today on Apple's App Store, the iOS-only Start is the latest offering from Iodine, a health tech startup that crowdsources reviews of medications for everything from asthma to heartburn. Since its launch last year, Iodine's founders — one a former executive editor of Wired, the other a former Google engineer who co-developed the company's flu-tracking software — noticed that a significant number of reviews submitted to the site were for antidepressants.
That's hardly surprising. According to surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2005 to 2008, roughly one in 10 Americans take antidepressants, making them the drugs most frequently prescribed to people between the ages of 18 and 44. And since efficacy varies from patient to patient, many people need to try more than one before finding one that works. But not everyone gets to that point: Half of psychiatric and primary care patients stop taking their medications within six months of starting, according to a 2012 study in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience.
"The system isn't very good at matching people to the right medication and then isn't very good about following up and tracking whether the medication is working for that individual," Iodine co-founder Thomas Goetz told BuzzFeed News.
That's where Start is supposed to come in. People tell the app what drug they've been prescribed and how often they're supposed to take it, and the app reminds them to do so and tracks their experiences on it. Users also tell Start what things in life they want to feel better about — like sleep, relationships, work, or family — and the side effects that most concern them. Every few days, the app asks them about those issues and symptoms. It then generates bi-weekly progress reports summing up their responses.
Iodine