UnknownNot Applicable

Probing Prefrontal Cortex Hemodynamic Alterations for Major Depression Disorder

China200 participantsStarted 2017-02-16

Plain-language summary

Major depression disorder (MDD) has high estimated lifetime prevalence rates of 16.6%. Currently, the diagnosis for the MDD mainly depends on patients' reports of symptoms, observed behaviors and disease course. Establishment of clinically useful biomarkers for the MDD diagnosis would enhance patient management and treatment effect, and lead to the therapies adjusted to the individual. However, no such biomarkers have been established up to now. Therefore, the development of objective and feasible biomarkers is of special significance and a great challenge for accurate and early diagnosis and treatment of depression, in order to overcome the limitations of relying on clinical interviews alone.The ability to correctly recognize emotional states from faces is instrumental for interpersonal engagement and social functioning. Impairments processing of facial emotional expressions and biased facial emotion detection are frequently found in the MDD patients. To date, the studies on neural mechanism of the facial emotion recognition of the MDD patients were mainly based on the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has not been applied for the facial emotion recognition for the depression patients up to now. To bridge the important gap in the literature, we used the fNIRS methodology to investigate the neural mechanisms of facial emotion recognition for the patients with depression. We hypothesize the physiological feature of the hemodynamic responses in prefrontal cortex measured by fNIRS under the task of face emotion recognition, including the difference of the median, the Mayer wave power, the mean cross wavelet coefficient, and the mean wavelet coherence coefficient, combined with the behavior measurement (behavior accuracy and response time), could provide a reliable and feasible diagnosis approach to differentiate patients with the MDD from healthy control (HC) subjects with acceptable sensitivity and specificity.

Who can participate

Age range18 Years – 35 Years

SexALL

See this in plain English?

AI-rewrites the medical criteria so a patient or caregiver can understand them. Always confirm with the trial site.

Inclusion Criteria: * MDD group: All subjects were free of psychotropic medication for a minimum of 4 weeks; Psychiatric diagnosis was determined by DSM-IV criteria; Depressed subjects were included with 17-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) scores ≥ 18; Mini-mental State Examination(MMSE) ≥ 24; All subjects had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. * HC group: All subjects were free of psychotropic medication for a minimum of 4 weeks; All subjects did not have any mental, neurological or physical diseases；HRSD scores ≤ 7; MMSE ≥ 28; All subjects had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Exclusion Criteria: * Exclusion criteria were any history of neurologic trauma resulting in loss of consciousness, any current neurologic disorder, any lifetime psychiatric disorder other than major depression in the MDD subjects, or any lifetime psychiatric disorder in control subjects. Careful attention was paid to excluding substance abuse disorders.

What they're measuring

Hamilton Depression Scale-17(HAMD-17) score alterations

Timeframe: Change from baseline HAMD-17 scores at 6 months

Trial details

NCT IDNCT03595020

SponsorXijing Hospital

Sponsor typeOTHER

Study typeOBSERVATIONAL

Primary completion2018-08-31