Hypothesis: The rates of response and remission, and time to response and remission would be significantly shorter in the MBC group, without greater dropout rates and side effect burden, compared with the standard treatment group.~Study design and setting This will be a multi-centre, with assessors blind to protocol and treatment group, parallel arm, randomized controlled trial (RCT). The study is a direct replication of a study conducted by Gou et al. (2015) in China.~Participants Participants will be recruited from psychiatric units of teaching and non-teaching hospitals in 6 centres: Karachi (population 23 million), Lahore (population 10 million), Rawalpindi (population 3 million), Hyderabad (population 2 million) and Quetta (population 1 million) and Multan (1.8 million).~Sample size The sample size of 120 participants for this exploratory trial is based on the study conducted by Guo et al.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, indicated as one of the two most disabling mental disorders by the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 (Vos et al., 2020). Despite several effective pharmacological and psychosocial interventions available globally, only about one-third of depressed patients achieve remission (Xiao et al., 2021). There is a need to establish scalable clinical management practices which utilize biopsychosocial assessments, formulate a differential diagnosis, and provide evidence-based treatments for patients with MDD (Hong et al., 2021). While significant evidence for effectiveness of Measurement Based Care (MBC) is found in clinical settings from high and middle-income countries, assessments of MBC compared with usual care for the treatment of MDD are yet to be completed in low-resource settings like LMICs. The aim of this trial is to determine the efficacy and safety of MBC in patients with MDD in comparison with standard care in Pakistan. In order to reduce the variance found in treatment-as-usual and isolate the impact of MBC, standard care for this trial will limit medication choices to either paroxetine or mirtazapine.