This comprehensive review provides an overview about placebo and nocebo phenomena in antidepressant trials. Improvements in the placebo groups may partly be explained through methodological issues such as natural course of depression and regression to the mean, but also fundamentally reflect investigators' and participants' expectations. A meta-analysis by our group of 96 randomized placebo-con...

Although recent data may provide theoretical support for the preventive use of antidepressants in cancer patients, so far no study has demonstrated the clinical benefits of such strategies in the general population of cancer patients [39, 41]. Moreover, an association between antidepressant use and the risk of tumor promotion could neither be excluded nor established. The aim of this study was ...

BACKGROUND There is increasing evidence that glial cells play a role in the pathomechanisms of mood disorders and the mode of action of antidepressant drugs. METHODS To examine whether there is a direct effect on the expression of different genes encoding proteins that have been implicated in the pathophysiology of affective disorders, primary astrocyte cell cultures from rats were treated wi...

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a tool with antidepressant potential that uses a coil placed on the scalp to produce a powerful magnetic field that directly stimulates only the outermost cortex. MRI scans were obtained in 29 depressed adults involved in an rTMS antidepressant clinical treatment. These scans were analyzed to investigate the effect of distance from coil to ...

Sir: The case report by Drs. Ashton and Bennett (January 1999 issue) is a welcome addition to the body of literature regarding the treatment of antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction. One point needs clarification: the authors state that their cases possibly represent the first patients treated with sildenafil for antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction. To date, an open trial 2 and 3 case...

BACKGROUND This meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) examines the efficacy of physical exercise as treatment for unipolar depression, both as an independent intervention and as an adjunct intervention to antidepressant medication. METHODS We searched PsycINFO, EMBASE, MEDLINE, CENTRAL, and Sports Discus for articles published until November 2014. Effect sizes were computed wit...

Antidepressant pharmacotherapy is to date the most often used treatment for depression, but the exact mechanism of action underlying its therapeutic effect is still unclear. Many theories have been put forward to account for depression, as well as antidepressant activity, but none of them is exhaustive. Neuroimmune endocrine impairment is found in depressed patients; high levels of circulating ...

Sir: The case report by Drs. Ashton and Bennett (January 1999 issue) is a welcome addition to the body of literature regarding the treatment of antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction. One point needs clarification: the authors state that their cases possibly represent the first patients treated with sildenafil for antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction. To date, an open trial 2 and 3 case...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders. Until the recent discovery of the rapid onset antidepressant action of ketamine, pharmacological treatments for MDD were limited to conventional antidepressant drugs with delayed clinical efficacy. Using a judgement bias task, this study has investigated whether the temporal differences observed in patients woul...

As shown in clinical studies, combinations of first generation normothymics (carbamazepine - CBZ) with atypical neuroleptics (olanzapine - OLA) lead to improvements in approximately half of patients treated for relapses of bipolar affective disease. Our previous studies have shown OLA to have an antidepressant effect when administered at a dose of 0.5 mg/kg only upon single administration; the ...