Active clinical trials for "Depression"

This is a randomized double-blinded placebo-controlled trial to see if treatment with sertraline as compared with placebo tablets will improve depression symptoms in patients with chronic kidney disease who have not yet started dialysis or received a kidney transplant. The investigators will also investigate whether sertraline treatment will improve quality of life and whether it is safe to use in patients with kidney disease. The study subject will be randomly assigned to take either sertraline or a placebo tablet for 12 weeks.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the long-term use of combined antidepressant plus mood stabilizer therapy is superior to mood stabilizer therapy alone in preventing the relapse and recurrence of bipolar depression.

The purpose of the study is to assess the efficacy of DEPREXIL administration in combination with relaxation psychotherapy in the treatment of patients with signs and symptoms of depression. The duration of this double-blind placebo controlled phase 3 clinical trial will be 24 weeks. The estimated number of persons to be recruited and randomized for the study is 200.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) continues to have a profound impact on individuals, families, and the health care system. Despite marked success in treating active individual episodes of unipolar depression, our understanding of the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in the return of symptoms remains extremely limited, and few interventions exist that specifically target factors involved in prophylaxis. The research being proposed is among the first that is designed to examine neurocognitive markers for depressive relapse vulnerability and link them directly to clinical prognosis. Hypothesis 1: Cortical midline structures (CMS) network recruitment will be associated with behavioural and neural indices of a reflexive attentional bias towards dysphoric stimuli in a divided attention task. Hypothesis 2: Behavioural and neural indices of dysphoric attentional bias following mood challenge will predict depression relapse in prospective 18-month follow up. Hypothesis 3: Relative to CBT, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) will normalize CMS and right insular/fronto-opercular cortices (INS-FO) network imbalance. Hypothesis 4: Relative to CBT, MBCT will normalize to healthy control levels, behavioural and neural indices of dysphoric attentional bias, which will be predictive of reduced relapse risk across a 24 month follow up.

Treatment resistant depression (TRD) is a major public health problem. Current therapeutic options for this patient population remain limited. With all available treatments, only a sub-set of those patients who achieve an antidepressant response are likely to achieve treatment-induced remission. The need for antidepressant medication that can provide both rapid and long lasting relief of TRD symptoms is widely recognized. There is new evidence that drugs that block NMDA glutamate receptors (NMDA antagonists) are promising candidates for meeting this need. Existing studies in TRD have used only a low-dose, brief infusion of ketamine that would not be expected to re-sensitize the NMDA receptor; in agreement with this theory, these prior studies have found only temporary improvements of depression. Our key hypothesis is that a higher-dose, longer-term ketamine infusion, such as that used in chronic pain studies, would provide a more robust and lasting improvement from depression. Accordingly, we will test whether a 100-hour ketamine infusion would be more effective than the standard 40-minute ketamine infusion currently used in other TRD studies. We will randomize subjects to one of 2 arms: (1) 100-hour (+/- 4 hours) ketamine infusion plus clonidine for the entire infusion (2) 40-minute ketamine infusion (plus clonidine) following a 100+/- hour saline infusion. All subjects will receive clonidine, an alpha-2 agonist, to minimize side effects of ketamine (namely, brief/mild psychotic and cognitive symptoms).

Stimulating the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) may restore a disturbed balance as seen in depression. In this double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial the investigators will test the effects of a single dose (500mg) fludrocortisone, an MR-agonist, on the information processing in healthy female volunteers (N = 2x20). The investigators want to investigate whether the acute administration of fludrocortisone (FC) in healthy females enhances the appraisal of emotional information related to depression, hypothesizing that: FC relative to placebo selectively improves the recognition of happy and fearful faces: resulting in more correct responses and faster RTs. FC induces a bias towards more positive self-description and an improved memory for positive information. Female participants were selected because the haplotype MRI180V is related to depression vulnerability in women, not in men. If the effects of fludrocortisone are comparable to the effects of antidepressants on the same tests and the same population, it might be a first indication that fludrocortisone may function as an antidepressant.

In summary, the investigators propose to integrate fMRI assessments within a clinical trial of quetiapine XR in patients with melancholic depression in order to test the predictions that: quetiapine XR treatment will be effective and safe for patients with major depression with melancholic features successful treatment with quetiapine XR will be associated with normalization of limbic areas associated with increased salivary cortisol response to a stressful task as well as normalization on the emotional faces task differences in the melancholic group compared with healthy volunteers. successful treatment with quetiapine XR will be associated with normalization of the salivary cortisol response to the stressful math task (i.e. there will be a diminished post-treatment mean AUC for cortisol secretion after the stress task compared to the pre-treatment AUC values in the patient group)

Minimal hepatic encephalopathy represents a common complication present in well-compensated cirrhotic patients that impairs patients daily functioning and health-related quality of life. Acetyl-L-carnitine has been shown to be useful in improving blood ammonia and cognitive functions in cirrhotic patients with minimal hepatic encephalopathy. This study evaluated the effects of acetyl-L-carnitine treatment on health related quality of life and on depression in patients with minimal hepatic encephalopathy.

The investigators hope to see if a commonly used drug such as ketamine could help depressed ER patients feel better and improve their mood quickly.

The aim of the study is to determine the effectiveness of a transdiagnostic psychotherapy intervention - namely, Common Elements Treatment Approach (CETA) - in reducing the severity of mental health symptoms experienced by torture and violence survivors displaced from Burma into Thailand. Specifically, the intervention seeks to measure reductions (if any) in symptoms of depression and trauma.