A new research has revealed that patients suffering from mild or moderate depression might end up benefitting "little" from antidepressant drugs and it is better to treat them with various other alternatives available.

For the sake of study, a group of researchers from America put together data from as many as 6 studies which involved 718 adult outpatients. Ranging from mildly to very severely depressed, with the level of depression calculated using the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale.

The researchers, led by Jay Fournier of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, discovered that the effects of antidepressant medicines varied significantly, depending upon how severe the symptoms are.

"True drug effects (an advantage of ADM over placebo) were nonexistent to negligible among depressed patients with mild, moderate and even severe baseline symptoms, whereas they were large for patients with very severe symptoms", the researchers noted.

Details of the study have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.