ChatGPT could be better at following depression guidelines than general practitioners, which may help medical professionals treat mental conditions.

The artificial intelligence tool lacks the gender or social class biases sometimes seen in the physician-patient relationship. The study's findings were published in Family Medicine and Community Health, the open-access journal that the British Medical Journal owns.

ChatGPT Could Help Treat Depression

The researchers of the study said that they need to conduct further work to examine the risks and ethical issues that arise from using artificial intelligence. An estimated 5% of adults worldwide have depression, based on data from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Many of these patients first turn to their general practitioners for assistance, and recommended treatment should largely be guided by evidence-based clinical guidelines that align with the severity of the depression, as per The Guardian.

The study comes as ChatGPT has the potential to offer fast, objective, data-based insights that can supplement traditional diagnostic methods and provide confidentiality and anonymity. Researchers from Israel and the United Kingdom compared how the AI tool evaluated cases of mild and severe depression with 1,249 French primary care doctors, 73% of whom were female.

The researchers used hypothetical case studies of patients with symptoms of sadness, sleep problems, and loss of appetite during the previous three weeks and a diagnosis of mild to moderate depression.

Eight versions of the vignettes were developed, all with different variations of patient characteristics, such as gender, social class, and depression severity. Each vignette was repeated ten times for ChatGPT versions 3.5 and 4.

The study's researchers said that artificial intelligence technology could improve decision-making in primary care. For cases of mild depression, ChatGPT version 3.5 recommended psychotherapy in 95% of cases, and ChatGPT version 4 did so in 97.5% of cases, according to Sky News.

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Use of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Diagnoses

On the other hand, primary care doctors recommended the same process in only 4.3% of cases, opting for the use of drugs 48% of the time or psychotherapy plus prescribed drugs 32.5% of the time.

Regarding severe cases of depression, 44.5% of doctors recommended psychotherapy plus prescribed drugs, while the two versions of the artificial intelligence bot recommended the method in 72% and 100% of cases, respectively.

Regarding the type of medicine recommended to fake patients, ChatGPT favored the exclusive use of antidepressants in 74% and 68% of cases. On the other hand, human doctors leaned towards a mix of antidepressants and anxiolytics/hypnotics in 67.4% of cases.

The researchers said the study's findings "aligned well with accepted guidelines for managing mild and severe depression, without showing the gender or socioeconomic biases observed among primary care physicians."

They also said ChatGPT version 4 demonstrated greater precision in adjusting treatment to comply with current clinical guidelines. However, they noted that further research is needed to refine AI recommendations for severe cases, said the Independent.

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