View clinical trials related to Major Depressive Disorder.
Filter by:Anhedonia is a core feature of major depressive disorder (MDD) (DSM-5). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have associated anhedonia in MDD with altered frontostriatal activity and functional connectivity relative to controls. Conversely, antidepressant treatment is associated with increased ability for patients with MDD to sustain frontostriatal activity in a manner predictive of decrease in anhedonia and gains in daily positive affect. Novel interventions are needed to address anhedonia. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to activate striatal reward circuits. Positive Affect Treatment (PAT) was developed to treat deficits in reward processing; a critical skill patients are trained on in PAT involves recounting and savouring of positive experiences. However, amotivation impedes some patients from engaging in positive activities, prompting the development of virtual reality reward training (VR RT) for this skill. Evidence is building that brain state at the time of rTMS impacts its therapeutic effect. For example, imaginal exposure and individualized symptom provocation just prior to rTMS enhances its therapeutic effect on post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, respectively. It is unknown whether VR RT can augment rTMS for MDD and if so whether it is mediated by enhancing changes in frontostriatal activity or functional connectivity. The current study is significant for multiple reasons. As mentioned, there is a paucity of effective treatments for anhedonia and this study may inform development of a novel treatment strategy that harnesses findings from affective neuroscience. Recent economic analysis suggests that rTMS can be more cost-effective than pharmacotherapy or ECT for treatment-resistant depression (Ontario Health, 2021). Our findings will provide insight on ways to synergize specific psychotherapeutic techniques with targeted stimulation of brain circuits to more effectively treat subtypes of depression.
The goal of this clinical trial is to test the efficacy of lactate (a natural substance) in combination with standard antidepressant treatment, in patients hospitalized for a major depressive episode. The main question[s] it aims to answer are: - does lactate diminishes depression severity when administered in combination with antidepressant ? - is it feasible to test lactate treatment in a large-scale clinical trial ? Participants will receive lactate intravenously daily (20 min infusion) for 5 days during hospitalisation (together with the standard antidepressant treatment). Researchers will compare with a group receiving a placebo instead of lactate to see if lactate has antidepressant effects.
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a very common illness that is usually treated with antidepressant medication. Depression can be caused by many things such as childhood experiences, genetics, and changes in the way the body and brain function. For those with depression where medication and psychotherapy have limited benefit, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is an effective treatment. rTMS is a treatment that involves stimulating certain areas of the brain with magnetic field pulses. Over time, the magnetic field pulses can gradually change the activity level of the stimulated brain region. This can be helpful in treating some kinds of psychiatric and neurological disorder, including MDD. It is not fully known how rTMS changes brain activity to improve symptoms of depression. However, certain brain areas responsible for behaviours impacted by depression are underactive in those with depression. One of those brain regions called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and the investigators will target this region using rTMS. By increasing the activity of these regions, rTMS could potentially improve depression symptoms. For participants receiving rTMS, the investigators will be using the participant's brain scan to better understand brain activity of the brain region stimulated by rTMS before and after treatment. In this study, the investigators will be collecting detailed information about participants' psychiatric history and depression symptoms, as well as brain scans and saliva samples. The saliva samples will undergo proteomic (having to do with proteins) analyses to identify biological markers ("biomarkers": biological features (e.g.: gene, protein) that can be measured to indicate factors related to rTMS response. The investigators' goal is to use this information to help us understand whether improvement to rTMS depends on brain activity or proteomic factors localized to two specific behaviours impacted by depression: reward processing and working memory (the capacity to hold information temporarily, such as holding a person's address in mind while listening to instructions about how to get there).
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a very common illness that is usually treated with antidepressant medication. Depression can be caused by many things such as childhood experiences, genetics, and changes in the way the body and brain function. It is most likely caused by a combination of several of these factors. The prevalence of suicide attempt in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is about 20%. Risk for suicide attempt can be increased by many things such as negative life events, genetics, and changes in the way the body and brain function. It is most likely caused by a combination of several of these factors. In this study, the investigators will be collecting detailed information about participants' psychiatric history and depression symptoms, as well as brain scans. The goal is to use this information to help us determine what predicts suicide attempt history.
Optimizing treatments in mental health requires an easy to obtain, continuous, and objective measure of internal mood. Unfortunately, current standard-of-care clinical scales are sparsely sampled, subject to recency bias, underutilized, and are not validated for acute mood monitoring. The recent shift to remote care also requires novel methods to measure internal mood. Recent advances in computer vision have allowed the accurate quantification of observable speech patterns and facial representations. The continuous and objective nature of these audio-facial behavioral outputs also enable the study of their neural correlates. Here, the investigators hypothesize that video-derived audio-facial behaviors have discrete neural representations in the limbic network and can provide a critical set of reliable longitudinal estimates of mood at low cost across home and clinic settings.
The goal of this study is to evaluate the use of ecological-momentary-assessment (EMA) as a method for scheduling maintenance treatments for patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) who responded to an initial acute course of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). To assess symptom re-emergence and severity over time, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 item (PHQ-9) will be administered weekly via a prompt with a link send to a participants' smart phones. Adaptive algorithm software will monitor each participant's PHQ-9 scores over time and determine when a threshold increase in symptoms has occured and maintenance TMS sessions should be offered. Participants in this study will be randomized to either receive weekly EMA (monitoring only) or weekly EMA with maintenance TMS sessions (scheduled as indicated by the EMA algorithm). Participation for each subject will last for one year, with maintenance TMS offered as an adjunct to ongoing treatment as usual (TAU) for depression, i.e., ongoing pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy.
Anhedonia, the inability to seek-out and experience pleasure, is a common symptom in depression that predicts treatment-resistance and is sometimes exacerbated by first-line antidepressants. In our previous research, we found that anhedonia decreases goal-directed behavior and its related neural activity. In this study, we will investigate target engagement from five-consecutive days of stimulation for participants that are within a unipolar major depressive episode and also have high symptoms of anhedonia.
The purpose of this study is to determine the safety and feasibility of sequencing psilocybin therapy with a short-duration, aiTBS protocol (Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, or SAINT) in individuals with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder.
Patients belonging to Group 1 (Major Depression) and 2 (Bipolar Disorder) will be tested with psychometric and functional scales at baseline (T0) and after 4 weeks of pharmacological therapy (T1), to evaluate clinical and functional response to treatment. MDD patients will be screened for the lifetime and recent occurrence of clinically meaningful suicidal ideation and behavior prior to recruitment (-T1). Moreover, in the MDD group, the emergence of clinically meaningful suicidal ideation and behavior will be evaluated at the baseline (T0) and after 4 weeks (T1) by means of the C-SSRS, accordingly to the routine clinical practice. Furtherly, to accomplish the pursues of this research, the two groups will undergo neuroimaging evaluation and a blood collection at the two timepoints for measuring the expression of ncRNA before and after treatment. Meanwhile, a lumbar puncture (LP) for CSF collection will be carried out at the baseline, measuring central levels of Negr-1 and other biomarkers of neurotropism potentially related to the aforementioned role of Negr1 in MDD. Group 3 will be comprehensive of 10 subjects without current or previous diagnosis of psychiatric disorders (healthy controls), who will be evaluated at baseline with psychometric and functional scales, neuroimaging and blood samples collection for ncRNA. Data obtained by the multimodal assessment of HCs at the baseline will be employed as normalization features in the statistical analysis of patients' data.
This is an open-label, parallel-group study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of ropanicant in participants with moderate to severe Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).