Active clinical trials for "Anhedonia"

This study will examine whether actively serving and veteran members of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who complete a treatment targeting anhedonia symptoms and amplifying positive emotional processing: 1) experience significant symptom reductions in anxiety, trauma, and depressive symptoms; 2) report increased experience of positive emotions; 3) report improvements to broad functioning and quality of life; and 4) find the treatment to be highly tolerable.

This research will use biobehavioral approaches to generate understanding about the linkages between sleep duration and timing, stressful life events, and depressive symptoms in adolescents, with a long-term aim of developing effective preventative interventions.

This is a clinical trial study that aims to evaluate the specificity of the relationship between reduced sensitivity to social reward and social anhedonia at both behavioral and neural levels. Individuals who recently experienced their first-episode psychosis will be recruited. Participants will be randomized 1:1 to motivational interviewing or a time- and format-matched control probe. At pre- and post-probe, participants will perform two social reward learning tasks in the scanner. With this design feature, we will examine the relationship between sensitivity to social reward and reduced subjective experience of social pleasure at both the behavioral and neural levels.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of ketamine on decision-making and emotion processing in a sample of individuals diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).

The goal of this study is to investigate the effects of selective histamine 3 antagonist pitolisant on brain function and cognition in healthy individuals. The main questions it aims to answer are: Does pitolisant alter functional activity in brain regions linked to reward and cognitive processing during rest or cognitive task performance? Does pitolisant alter cognitive ability across a range of psychological domains, including working memory, executive functioning and emotional processing? Participants will undertake fMRI scanning in addition to a battery of tasks designed to measure cognitive and emotional processing after taking a single dose of pitolisant or placebo. Researchers will compare differences in functional activity, cognition and emotional processing across the pitolisant and placebo groups.

The main aim of this research is to explore the effects that ketamine has on the functional connectivity of the brain in participants with treatment resistant depression (TRD). This study will investigate the relationship between these changes and response to treatment as measured by clinical scales, as well as examining drug induced changes in reward and emotion based brain activity, structural connectivity, cerebral blood flow, cognition, metabolism and blood markers of brain plasticity.

This project will use the experimental medicine approach of a Phase IIa Proof of Mechanism 16-week, randomized, double-blind, controlled trial of L-DOPA versus placebo administration in combination with a 16 week social skills training group in order to: 1) identify differences in social reward processes in adolescent and young adult ASD participants versus healthy controls as measured by fMRI activation in reward circuitry; 2) provide evidence of dopaminergic moderating effects on social reward components in ASD with greater pre- to post-treatment changes expected in the subjects randomized to L-DOPA versus placebo; 3) examine the hypothesis that baseline readouts of putative dopamine signaling (wanting activation responses) will predict the extent of fMRI reward-related activation changes pre- to post-treatment; and, 4) examine the proposed relationship between pre- to post- L-DOPA fMRI reward changes and changes in individual self-report ratings of social wanting and ratings of videotaped positive affect in a structured interaction with an examiner. The study will enroll 56 participants with DSM-5 ASD between the ages of 13-30 years of age and 18 healthy control participants without histories of psychopathology for baseline comparisons.

The prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) is relatively low in childhood (i.e., 1-3%), but increases substantially during adolescence. By the age of 18, approximately 15% of adolescents will have experienced at least one episode of MDD. A growing body of research implicates abnormalities in reward circuitry as playing a critical role in the development and maintenance of depressive symptoms in adolescents. Importantly, these reward-circuitry abnormalities have been linked to anhedonia (i.e., decreased pleasure or blunted reactivity to rewarding stimuli). Behavioral Activation (BA) represents a promising - and relatively simple to deliver - nonpharmacologic intervention for adolescent depression, which has been shown to be at least as effective as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with regards to symptom reduction and lowering the risk of relapse in adult samples. More recently, promising data have emerged from the application of BA to depressed adolescents. BA can be conceptualized as a treatment directly targeting anhedonia. More specifically, BA targets anhedonia through behavioral change strategies aimed at gradually increasing patients' exposure to and engagement with rewarding stimuli and positively reinforcing experiences. Given this treatment focus, BA may be particularly beneficial for adolescents struggling with relatively elevated levels of anhedonic symptoms. Accordingly, the present study will examine the role of anhedonia and reward functioning in predicting treatment response in BA. In addition, analyses will be conducted examining the reward-related neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying anhedonic symptom improvement in BA.

The purpose of this study is to identify how trauma-focused psychotherapy changes the function of brain circuitry in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and how this mediates improvements in the diminished ability to experience positive emotions following a traumatic or extremely stressful life event. In this instance, we will be using cognitive processing therapy (CPT), a widely-utilized and evidence-based treatment for PTSD.

This study evaluates a schedule of precise repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for depressive adolescent with anhedonia. In this randomized controlled trial, half of the participants will receive repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, and the other will receive sham stimulation.