Active clinical trials for "Depressive Disorder"

This study aims to determine whether ventral striatal dopamine release is a mechanism of reward motivation in major depression, whether dopamine release is low in depression, and whether DA release and reward motivation predict response to dopamine-targeted treatment with pramipexole.

A non interventional, descriptive, longitudinal cohort study is designed, trying to obtain local data about the prevalence of non remitted depressed patients after an antidepressant treatment, and to get information about sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of these patients as well as features of their treatments and compare them with those of the patients that achieve remission. Also the effect of patient´s expectation in the treatment outcome will be examined.

This study assesses risk factors for depressive relapse in women undergoing fertility treatment with histories of major depressive disorder (MDD) or bipolar disorder. The study is focused on the acute risk factors of depressive relapse. The investigators hypothesize that risk for depressive relapse will be greater among women who stop antidepressants compared to those who continue treatment with these agents.

This study may help identify how abnormalities in brain systems that control the ability to ignore irrelevant information may contribute to the development of depression in older adults.

The purpose of the study is: to find out how long teenagers getting talk therapy (interpersonal psychotherapy) for depression should get therapy before the therapist decides whether or not the teenager is improving enough, and to compare two ways of providing treatment to teenagers who have not improved enough.

This study will investigate the role of dopaminergic neural systems in the symptoms and treatment of depression. 40 patients who meet DSM-IV criteria for a diagnosis of depression will be compared to a matched sample of healthy controls. The depressed group will receive open label treatment with Bupropion MR (150mg bd) for 6 weeks. The control group will receive no treatment. All participants will be assessed before treatment, after 2 weeks treatment and at 6 weeks treatment. The outcomes assessed will be 1) fMRI estimates of neural response to reward to emotionally valenced stimuli (1st and 2nd assessments), 2) computer based measures of emotional processing (all assessments) and 3) standardised questionnaire measures of depressive symptoms (all assessments). The primary study hypothesis is that altering central dopamine using Bupropion will lead to altered neural responses to rewarding stimuli in the depressed patients (i.e. comparing fMRI outcomes between assessment visits 1 and 2). A secondary hypothesis is that this neural change will predict subsequent symptom response to the bupropion (i.e. comparing symptom scores between assessment visits 1 and 3), Lastly, the study will test the hypothesis that baseline differences in reward circuitry will be particularly associated with symptoms of anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure).

This study will report on the outcome of a clinical program, operational since 1998, that has used surgery targeting an emotional pathway in the brain in the treatment of severe depressive illness that has failed to respond to all other available interventions. Benefit from surgery was anticipated on the basis that the lesion (bilateral anterior capsulotomy) is a well established surgical target for treating severe treatment resistant depression.

Purpose: To document data on effectiveness of NEURAPAS® balance (NPB) in the treatment of nervous restlessness in children aged 6 to 12. Each patient is treated with NPB. No placebo group is established. Course and severity of symptoms is documented by a questionnaire on 13 common symptoms of nervous restlessness and a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). A standardized questionnaire (Parent Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL/4-18)) is completed. Choice and doses of therapy are at the respective physician's discretion. The planned treatment and observation period is 2 - 4 weeks.

Randomized trials demonstrate that depression management products can improve clinical and organizational outcomes sufficiently for selected employers to realize a return on investment. Rather than usual care marketing which uses voltage-enhanced promises to sell voltage-diminished products, the investigators designed an evidence-based (EB) intervention to encourage employers to purchase a depression management product that offers the type, intensity and duration of care shown to provide clinical and organizational value. In an RCT designed to examine employer benefit purchasing behavior of depression products in 360 employer members of over 20 regional business coalitions, the research team proposes: (a) to compare the impact of evidence-based (EB) to usual care (UC) presentations on employer benefit purchasing behavior, and (b) to identify mediators and organizational moderators of intervention impact on employer benefit purchasing behavior. This study addresses what policy analysts argue is one of the most pivotal problems in the translation of evidence-based care to 'real world' settings: whether purchasers can be influenced to buy health care products on the basis of value rather than cost. In the likely event that EB > UC, the study will provide encouragement to use an evidence-based approach to market new health care products to private payers on the basis of the product's clinical and organizational value. UC may achieve comparable outcomes to EB if the limiting factors in benefit purchasing are organizational, purchasing group and vendor constraints that no intervention can meaningfully modify. Support for this scenario would encourage the targeted marketing of new products to coalition members with empirically identified organizational, purchasing group and vendor characteristics, using usual care strategies.

Previous research studies have shown that depression is associated with changes in structure and activity in different parts of the brain and that antidepressant medication can affect brain activity in different parts of the brain in individuals suffering from depression. The primary purpose of the study is to find out more about how the antidepressant medication duloxetine affects brain activity and structure in individuals with depression.