BACKGROUND A growing body of evidence shows that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays a role in depressive disorder. Serum BDNF levels are lower in depressed patients and they increase after a long course of antidepressant treatment. Our study aims to test the effect of antidepressant treatment on serum BDNF levels in patients with a depressive episode, after they have achieved remiss...

Knowledge on mechanisms involved in early prediction of response to antidepressant medication may help optimize clinical decision making. Recent studies regarding response to pharmacotherapy implicate resilience-like mechanisms and involvement of positive, rather than negative emotions. The aim of the current study is to examine the contribution of early change in positive affect to the predict...

aChange in Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) (A) and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) (B) mixed-model analysis results are noted on figures, with *P < .05 and **P < .01 on a last-observationcarried-forward paired t test (gray bar represents remission cut-off). The relationship between acute improvement after ketamine (day 1) vs improvement after 8 weeks of d-cycloserine treatment (C) is sh...

INTRODUCTION Non-response to an antidepressant monotherapy in unipolar depression is quite common. Therefore strategies for subsequent treatment steps are necessary. However, there is a lack of direct comparisons of these different strategies. In this naturalistic study we compared the outcome to different strategies after failure of the primary antidepressant treatment. METHODS Failure of pr...

The paper proves a new uniqueness result for viscosity solutions of the Dirichlet problem for Hamilton-Jacobi equations of the form H(x; u; D x 0 u) = 0 in ; u = g on @; where is an open subset or R n and D x 0 u is the partial gradient of the scalar function u with respect to the rst n 0 variables (n 0 n). The main theorem states that there is a viscosity solution of the equation which is uniq...

In all clinical and research work, it is important not only to have uniform diagnostic criteria but also some means of objectively quantifying the presence and severity of the illness being studied. For this purpose, a number of ra t ing scales have been devised for depressive disorders, probably the single most commonly used one being the Hamilton Ra t ing Scale (Hamil ton, 1960). The total sc...

BACKGROUND The effects of antidepressants for treating depressive disorders have been overestimated because of selective publication of positive trials. Reanalyses that include unpublished trials have yielded reduced effect sizes. This in turn has led to claims that antidepressants have clinically insignificant advantages over placebo and that psychotherapy is therefore a better alternative. To...

The aim of the study was to investigate the long-term (one year) effectiveness of a 12-session weekly cognitive behavior group therapy (CBGT) on patients with depression. This was a single-blind randomized controlled study with a 2-arm parallel group design. Eighty-one subjects were randomly assigned to 12 sessions intervention group (CBGT) or control group (usual outpatient psychiatric care gr...

Patients 340 outpatients who were ≥ 18 years of age (mean age 42 y, 66% women); had a current diagnosis of MDD; and scored ≥ 20 on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) (mean score 22.8) and ≤ 60 on the Global Assessment of Functioning (mean score 53.6) after a 1 week placebo run in period. Exclusion criteria included a score > 2 on the HDRS suicide item, serious physical or psychiatric d...

Several studies have demonstrated the involvement of 5-HT1A receptors in the pathogenesis of depression and in the antidepressant response to SSRIs. A functional new variant in the promoter region of the 5-HT1A gene was recently reported (-1019 C>G). The aim of this study is to investigate a possible association between this 5-HT1A receptor variant and antidepressant response to fluvoxamine in ...