Active clinical trials for "Anhedonia"

The purpose of this 10-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled study is to determine whether inflammation impacts reward and motor neural circuitry to contribute to depressive symptoms like anhedonia and psychomotor slowing in people with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and depression. Sixty male and female patients with HIV who have depression, anhedonia and high inflammation and are stable on effective treatment for their HIV will be randomized to receive either the anti-inflammatory drug baricitinib or a placebo for 10 weeks. Participants will complete lab tests, medical and psychiatric assessments, neurocognitive testing, functional MRI (fMRI) scans, and optional spinal taps as part of the study. The total length of participation is about 5 months.

Despite efforts to prevent suicide, US rates are climbing, and suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth. Digital tools, especially personal smartphones, are promising avenues to address these issues and can be used to provide a unique understanding of risk factors, including psychological distress, anhedonia and behavioral withdrawal, and sleep disturbance among high-risk individuals. This project aims to enhance the effectiveness of the delivery of preventative health care to youth at risk for suicide by developing a comprehensive digital platform that allows practitioners to integrate mobile sensing data and HIPAA-compliant client communication tools into their management of these young people.

The purpose of this study is to use an experimental inflammatory challenge to examine whether older adults with symptoms of anxiety experience loss of pleasure or loss of motivation when they are exposed to inflammation. Loss of pleasure or loss of motivation will be evaluated using self-report questionnaires, computer tasks, and during a brain scan.

Deficits in motivation and pleasure are common in depression, and thought to be caused by alterations in the ways in which the brain anticipates, evaluates, and adaptively uses reward-related information. However, reward processing is a complex, multi-circuit phenomenon, and the precise neural mechanisms that contribute to the absence or reduction of pleasure and motivation are not well understood. Variation in the clinical presentation of depression has long been a rule rather than an exception, including individual variation in symptoms, severity, and treatment response. This heterogeneity complicates understanding of depression and thwarts progress toward disease classification and treatment planning. Discovery of depression-specific biomarkers that account for neurobiological variation that presumably underlies distinct clinical manifestations is critical to this larger effort.

The purpose of this 8-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled, study is to explore new treatment options for people with depression who have high inflammation and anhedonia. Seventy male and female participants with depression, between 25-55 years of age, with higher levels of inflammation and anhedonia will be randomized to receive L-DOPA or matched placebo over 8 weeks. Participants will complete lab tests, medical and psychiatric assessments, motivation and motor tasks, and MRI scans as part of the study. The total length of participation is approximately 10 to 12 weeks.

This study is a multicenter clinical research and focuses on the exploring of optimal diagnosis and treatment strategies of MDD based on anhedonia.

The aim of this proposal is to demonstrate that stimulation of different brain regions differently affects the electroencephalographic feature known as the Reward Positivity (RewP).

This study examines how people respond to rewards and losses, and the extent to which these responses are linked or distinct among people experiencing depressed mood, anhedonia, and/or anxiety.

Compelling evidence indicates inflammation plays a role in depression, but potential mechanisms linking inflammation to depression, such as dysregulated reward processing, are poorly understood. This study comprehensively evaluates effects of inflammation on reward across dimensions (e.g., anticipating versus receiving a reward) and types (e.g., money vs. smiling faces) in younger and older women. Characterizing how inflammation shapes the dynamic and multidimensional reward system, and how this may differ by age, may give insight into risk factors for depression and help identify critical points for intervention.

Anhedonia is a symptom dimension that characterizes many individuals suffering from depression, as well as some types of anxiety, psychosis, and substance use. For the most part, treatments are effective in decreasing negative affect but ineffective in improving anhedonia, with some antidepressant medications even worsening symptoms of anhedonia. Yet anhedonia is a significant marker of poor prognosis as well as suicidal ideation and actual suicide. The development of effective treatments for anhedonia is thus of paramount importance. Advances in neuroscience indicate specific targets that may underlie anhedonia that can be shifted through behavioral training. The investigators have developed such a program and found it to be effective in raising positive affect, especially for depressed or anxious individuals with anhedonia at baseline. To date, this program has been implemented by highly trained clinicians, which have supervised its implementation on a large scale. Moreover, the behavior program is dependent on readily available rewarding experiences, which anhedonia obviously challenges. Furthermore, mechanistic evaluation is impeded by intra¬- and inter-¬individual variability in exposure to rewarding stimuli. Virtual Reality (VR) offsets these barriers by repeated controlled immersion in experiences designed to enhance approach motivation, initial responsiveness to reward attainment, and reward learning. In this current study, the investigators aim to measure clinical outcomes using Virtual Reality-Reward Training (VR-RT).