Active clinical trials for "Bipolar Disorder"

The goals of this study are to replicate previous findings of genetic predictors of response to clozapine and other antipsychotic drugs.

The presented project is an open and controlled single-center prospective exploratory study, evaluating the metabolic concentrations in the ventral striatum (VS), the Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) on the left and on the right of patients in remission of unipolar mood disorder and type II bipolar mood disorder compared to each other and to healthy subjects using NMR spectrometric measurements. We hypothesize that there is a significant difference between the mean glutamate concentrations in the ventral striatum (right and left) of the two groups of unipolar and bipolar type II patients. The average glutamate concentration would be higher for participants in the group of type II bipolar patients.

For patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD), a single low dose of intravenous (IV) ketamine can help relieve symptoms as quickly as 24 hours later. The main problem with IV ketamine for TRD is that the effect is short-lived, lasting only days to 1 or 2 weeks. Furthermore, IV ketamine is a resource-intensive treatment, and the safety of long-term, repeated use for depression is unknown. To provide this treatment in a safe and cost-effective way, Investigators must allocate it efficiently to those patients who have the greatest need and probability of benefit. Therefore, this project aims to find clinical features (signs, symptoms, and parts of a patient's history) that will help predict which patients are most likely to respond to a single dose of IV ketamine for TRD. This will help guide patient selection and triaging. Investigators will recruit 40 participants with TRD over one year, and randomize them to one of two conditions (ketamine followed by an active placebo 3-weeks later, or vice versa). With clinical data collected through detailed interviews and questionnaires, this study design will let us evaluate how well such factors predict (A) rapid response at 24-hours, and (B) sustained response at 7 and 14 days.

Bipolar disorders affect approximately 4.5 million people across the European Union (EU) and are associated with high annual healthcare and societal costs. Bipolar disorder I and II represent disorders that cause extreme fluctuation in a person's mood, energy, and ability to function, in which symptoms of (hypo)mania and depression alternate. The depressive episodes of bipolar disorders are often referred to as bipolar depression (BD). In other words: it is a phase/state of the disorder. For many patients with BD, the depressive polarity is often more pervasive and more debilitating than manic states, with estimates that depressed mood accounts for up to two-thirds of the time spent unwell, even with treatment. The burden of not received an effective treatment for BD is high: more severe psychopathology, higher rates of unemployment, more hospitalisations, lower quality of life, lower cognitive functioning, risk of suicide, comorbidities and poorer social and occupational functioning and thus more carer burden. For BD, the treatment guidelines are very heterogeneous, amongst other reasons because the disease is heterogeneous and treatments should be tailored to the patients. There is no clear treatment algorithm and it cannot yet be predicted which treatment will be effective. Especially the place of adjunctive antidepressants is under debate. Usually, for psychiatric disorders (including bipolar disorder), a patient is considered to be treatment-resistant is two medicinal treatments have been tried (in sufficient duration and dosage) without sufficient success. For BD, there is no consensus on when to consider a patient as treatment-resistant, but the most common definition is after one prior treatment failure. This raises the research question whether adjunctive antidepressants to treat BD should be introduced earlier in the treatment. Additionally, The INTENSIFY trial is part of the larger Horizon 2021 project, with the central goal of paving the way for a shift towards a treatment decision-making process tailored for the individual at risk for treatment resistance. To that end, we aim to establish evidence-based criteria to make decisions of early intense treatment in individuals at risk for treatment resistance across the major psychiatric disorders of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression.

This is a single-arm pilot study to examine the impact of BXCL501 (sublingual film formulation of dexmedetomidine) administration on reducing the severity of undifferentiated acute agitation in patients presenting to the emergency department with underlying bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. This study is designed to evaluate BXCL501 for its FDA-approved indication -- treatment of agitation associated with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia -- applied in the emergency department setting.

Primary objective: To examine the impact of the sustained use of the health app and smart body fat scale on weight management and patient engagement Secondary objectives: To compare the difference in weight loss between the participants who have good compliance to app + scale protocol and the participants who have bad compliance To evaluate the longitudinal association between self-monitoring adherence and percent weight loss. To evaluate the prospective association between monthly % weight loss and the subsequent month of self-monitoring adherence List the clinical hypotheses: At least 50% of participants will achieve 7% weight reduction compared with baseline by self-weight monitoring using smart body fat scale and health app. The self-monitoring adherence is associated with greater weight loss. The monthly weight loss is associated with the subsequent month of self-monitoring adherence. The self-weight monitoring using smart body fat scale and health app are feasible by evaluating the compliance and completeness of the data.

While effective interventions for depression exist, their success rates are unsatisfactory and their provision is haphazard. The Canadian Depression Research and Intervention Network (CDRIN) Maritimes Depression Hub will improve the delivery of care and the quality of outcomes for youths, adults and seniors with depression across the Maritimes. The investigators will establish an integrated system of assessment, treatment, research and education related to depression with the active involvement of those with lived experience. The establishment of a patient registry is a key step that will facilitate evaluation and reform of current services, integration of patient choice and community resources into treatment programs, monitoring long-term outcomes, and development of more effective treatment approaches through research. The registry will facilitate research that will include validation of new diagnostic and outcome measurement tools, low-cost clinical trials and collaborative projects with national and international partners. Educational programs will involve training the next generation of researchers, those with lived experience, clinicians, and health system managers in critical appraisal and will facilitate their involvement in research. The registry, the proposed systematic measurement of outcomes and the broad dissemination of information and skills will improve the quality of research and of care as well as the experience of patients and their families. The need for a registry: It is increasingly recognized that major advances in the treatment of mental disorders will require large scale clinical research. Recently demonstrated ways of completing large-scale research with finite resources include the routine use of electronic health records (EHR), data linkage and randomized registry trial. Use of EHR is the most efficient way of rapidly obtaining large amounts of information. However, EHR cannot completely exclude confounding by indication and other unmeasured variables. Therefore, tests of treatment effects require experimental designs that cannot be replaced by routine health records data. The gold standard for testing the effects of treatment in an unbiased way is the randomized controlled trial (RCT), where measured and unmeasured confounders are balanced through the randomization process and any remaining confounding is due to chance alone. RCTs are valued as the highest level of evidence, but are costly and take significant time to be completed, partly because of the need to screen a large group of individuals to identify eligible participants. The most efficient unbiased test of interventions, new treatment modalities and novel ways of treatment delivery is a method that combines EHR use with the randomized controlled trial (RCT) methodology: the randomized registry trial (RRT). The RRT takes advantage of a registry of individuals with available information to identify a large number of individuals suitable for an RCT. The RRT approach is efficient especially if the same information (e.g. diagnosis and treatment history) is used repeatedly for different purposes. The same information can be used for clinical purposes, service improvement and multiple research projects. RRT will allow obtaining answers about the efficacy of new treatments and management strategies significantly faster and at a much lower cost than traditional RCTs. Therefore, the investigators propose to establish a registry that has the capacity to conduct RRTs. The proposed registry will be integrated with similar efforts across Canada. Jointly, this collaborative network of registries will facilitate fast and economical testing of new treatments, which is urgently needed to advance the therapeutic options for people with depression and related conditions.

Bipolar disorder (BD) ïs the fourth leading cause of disability worldwide among young people. Differences in demographic and clinical characteristics between patients do not influence educational achievement and receipt of disability pension, indicating that there are other factors such as neurocognitive function that are of importance for maintaining occupational and social function. Research has shown that at the group level, cognitive deficits are present in euthymic BD patients, while approximately 30%-50% of BD patients is not different from healthy controls when it comes to cognitive function. There is however little knowledge of risk and resilience factors for cognitive impairment in BD. Factors likely to contribute to cognitive and functional outcomes in BD, such as sleep, obesity, biological rhythms, comorbid medical and psychiatric conditions are also understudied. While it has been customary to focus research on factors related to the negative illness trajectories, the overarching aim of the current project is to explore factors associated with favourable outcomes. This shift in research focus is essential to elucidate factors related to more preserved function since this represents a clear gap in knowledge today.

To initiate a low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF) or ketogenic dietary (KD) intervention among a cohort of outpatients with bipolar illness who also have metabolic abnormalities, overweight/obesity, and/or are currently taking psychotropic medications experiencing metabolic side effects.

BIPGEN is a cross-sectional study on the genetics of bipolar disorder. As a subproject of BIPGEN, BIP-COVID is a cross-sectional genetics study about risks & resilience in the COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease) pandemic in bipolar disorder (BD) and healthy controls at the Medical University of Graz. Study participants with BD and controls from the well-established BIPLONG and BIPGEN studies will undergo a special BIP-COVID visit, which will include a COVID-19 specific online Lime survey about the psychological burden in the COVID-19 crisis, a COVID-19 antibody test (IgM and IgG), inflammation markers and isolation of DNA from fasting blood. Genotyping of DNA will be done with the GSA V.3 array. Genetic analyses (Polygenic Risk Scores of I. Stress or Major Depression and II. COVID-19 infection established with the programs PLINK, PRSice and R) will be used to analyze the genetic mechanisms of COVID-19 pandemic associated psychological symptoms and COVID-19 infection risk. Systems biology methods will be used to depict protective pathways against COVID-19 infection (e.g. Lithium pathways) and against COVID-19 associated psychiatric symptoms.