Active clinical trials for "Depression"

In this study the investigators are examining the neuronal processes of a mindfulness based emotion regulation training for reducing depressive rumination. The research of depressive rumination helps in the developement of new therapies for depressive disorders. Goal of this project is to have a look at the coherences between stress, mindfulness resources, depressive rumination and their neuronal correlates. Therefore the investigators are collecting the data of 48 patients with a depressive diagnosis in a randomized intervention-study with a treatment as usual (TAU) waiting-control-list versus an active intervention group. An additional 48 healthy control subjects are planned to be measured.

Major depressive disorder is a serious, recurrent and disabling mental disorder, which is the second leading cause of years lost to disability worldwide. Accumulating evidence suggests the important role for inflammation and oxidative stress in the pathophysiology of depression. Sulforaphane extracted from broccoli sprout is an agent with potent anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory activity. Previous studies suggested sulforaphane activates Keap1-Nrf2 system to prevent depression-like phenotype in mice. In this study, the investigator attempts to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of sulforaphane plus a fixed oral antipressant in adult participants diagnosed with depression.

The lifetime prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) is 10%~20%. Worldwide, nearly 340 million individuals have suffered the torture of depression. World Health Organization has reported that MDD would become the most serious global burden of disease and eventually turn into a public health problem in 2030. Varied clinical symptoms, inappropriate treatment, unclear pathogenesis, and lack of recurrent risk early-warning predictors cause a series of clinical problems, such as low diagnostic rate, low effective treatment rate, and high recurrent rate. Hence, this study aims to search multidimensional markers for early diagnosis of MDD, to establish optimized personalized therapy, and to explore sensitive recurrence predictors. Based on the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), MDD is subdivided into eight different clinical specifiers, one of which the incident rate of MDD with atypical features reaches 30%~38%. However, there is still a lack of meta-evidence for the clinical treatment strategy in MDD with atypical features. And 45.4 percentage of MDD with atypical features convert to bipolar disorder. Therefore, this study will focus on three issues about what's the objective endophenotype in MDD with atypical features, how to select appropriate personalized treatment for MDD with atypical features, what's the predictive biomarker of conversion to bipolar disorder. Based on the investigators' previous findings, this study will investigate adult depression at a cross-sectional study and a prospective cohort study. Multivariate informatics analysis was performed from three research dimensions (cognitive neuropsychology, metabonomics, and multimodal neuroimaging), including atypical features, "cold/hot" cognition assessment, KP (kynurenine pathway) metabolomics and inflammatory factors, multimodal MRI robust property. Referring guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of depression and evidence-based medicine evidence, MDD with atypical features are divided into f groups (antidepressants, antidepressants+mood stabilizers, mood stabilizers, treat as usual). Then, the investigators perform follow-up to verify optimized treatment strategies and to explore risk factors of conversion from MDD with atypical features to bipolar disorder. Furthermore, this study performs correlation analysis to analyze cross-omics data, weight coefficient analysis to analyze multidimensional indexes, clustering analysis to analyze multivariate bio-information data, and artificial intelligence technologies (such as pattern recognition, and machine learning) to realize the transformation from medical data to practical transformation. Eventually, this study builds three specific models (the multidimensional early diagnosis models for MDD with atypical features, the optimized personalized therapy model, and the recurrence and conversion risk early-warning model), which form the integrated intelligent platform for multidimensional diagnosis, personalized treatment, recovery management of MDD with atypical features.

The study investigates the acute psychological effects of a whole-body-workout using Electromyostimulation (EMS) in participants with depression and healthy individuals.

Families who experience maternal mental illness and a variety of chronic stressors are currently underserved by the parenting programs. The investigators propose that impairments in maternal self-regulation, which result in unsupportive parenting, directly impact children's own self-regulation and neurobiology, leading to risk for intergenerational transmission of mental illness. The objective of this study is to develop and evaluate a program that is targeted at improving underlying self-regulatory mechanisms in both mothers with depression and their 3- to 5-year-old children. It is hypothesized that children exposed to maternal mental illness will have greater self-regulatory deficits across emotional and behavioural domains compared to children not exposed to mental illness. The effects of maternal mental illness are expected to be compounded for children of mothers reporting a higher degree of chronic stressors, including poverty, housing instability, violence, and low social support. Further, it is hypothesized that taking a dual-generation intervention approach to addressing self-regulatory mechanisms underlying psychopathology at the level of the mother, child, and dyad (i.e. parenting interactions) will improve both maternal capacities and child outcomes. A feasibility study has been conducted in-person (NCT04347707). Results from this trial showed positive effects on child and mother well-being as well as parenting skills. Our current study will be conducted remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic to adhere to public health guidelines to reduce in-person contact and physical distance. The objectives for this study are two-fold: 1) establish a better understanding of the self-regulatory processes that are altered in preschool-aged children exposed to maternal mental illness, and determine the mediating role of parenting behaviours, as well as the moderating impact of chronic stress exposure; and 2) evaluate a novel dual-generation intervention for mothers with mental illness using a virtual format and their 3- to 5-year-old children based on existing gold-standard evidence-based approaches.

The acute and remission depression patients of 18-65 years old were recruited. At the time of enrollment, the demographic, symptomatic, neuropsychological and medication adherence data was collected. After the completion of the baseline assessment and examination, the patients were given antidepressant treatment or antidepressant treatment combined with Internet-based interventions. Clinical evaluation was performed at 1, 3 months (acute patients) and 6, 12 months (remission patients) after treatment, including the medication adherence, therapeutic efficacy, recurrence rate and functional rehabilitation. Through above work, this research is expected to provide clinicians with a set of Internet generalized technologies to improve the compliance and clinical outcomes of patients with depression, and to provide patients with treatment and management of the entire disease cycle.

Major depressive depression (MDD) affects a quarter of young adults and is associated with marked global burden in this population. Recently, growing literature has shown that cognitive dysfunction is common in young adults with depression. There is a vast amount of evidence indicating aerobic exercise has positive effects on cognitive function in healthy as well as in subjects with depression. The results might be dependent on neuroplastic changes induced by aerobic exercise. Nevertheless, the neurocognitive mechanisms of aerobic exercise in young adults with depression has not received systematic investigation. In addition, the association between the underlying brain physiology and cognitive performance has not been explored so far. In this project, the investigators aim to explore the relevance of a single session of aerobic exercise for human brain physiology and the impact of respective physiological effects on cognitive processes in young adults with depression.

Depressive symptoms are common non-motor symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease and seriously affect the quality of life and prognosis of patients. Currently, treatment measures for patients with Parkinson's disease with depression are mainly limited to pharmacotherapy, but the side effects of antidepressants and their interaction with anti-Parkinsonian drugs limit the use of pharmacotherapy. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a new painless and non-invasive neuromodulation technique that is commonly used in the treatment of depression. As the number of people with Parkinson's disease increases in China, the number of patients with Parkinson's disease and depression requiring rTMS treatment will also increase. The size and shape of individual brains, the distance between the stimulation coil and the responding neuronal tissue, and the location and orientation of anatomical structures are all different, and the use of common localization methods is usually limited by these individual anatomical differences. The traditional method relies on manual positioning of the coil, which is time-consuming and inefficient, and it is difficult to meet the requirements of position, angle, and coil orientation simultaneously. Studies have shown that the benefits of using navigation for rTMS treatment are up to twice as high as those of non-navigation methods. Therefore precise localization is a must for the future standardized application of rTMS in the development of patients with Parkinson's disease with depression. In this study, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation with neuronavigation to treat patients with Parkinson's disease and depression, and reconstructed cephalometric models with individual cranial imaging data to individualize and precisely target stimulation sites, making rTMS more precise and effective in treating patients with Parkinson's disease and depression, and providing new avenues for further clinical and scientific research.

This study will examine the feasibility and efficacy of lifestyle medicine for the enhancement of psychological wellness in adult. The main components of lifestyle intervention typically include physical activity, diet, relaxation/mindfulness, sleep and socialisation. These components are weaved with psychological elements such as stress management, cognitive restructuring, motivational interviewing, and goal setting strategies that are led by clinical psychologists. While lifestyle medicine has been recognised for centuries a a mean to improve physical health, the field of lifestyle medicine in the context of mental health is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, there is increasing evidence demonstrating the efficacy of individual components of lifestyle medicine (e.g. diet, physical activities, and sleep) on mood and stress management. With a well-researched lifestyle medicine programme adopted from Australia, the research team of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has customised the intervention protocol to fit the Chinese culture. The investigators aim to examine the effectiveness of an integration of multiple lifestyle adjustments on depression from a holistic body-mind perspective.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of The Behavioral Activation Protocol, a psychological treatment for the intervention of mild to moderate depression. It is compared the effectiveness of the treatment with the changes of the same participants before and after the treatment. The changes are being assessed through subjective measures such as psychometrics and objective measures such as electroencephalography.