University of Iowa Interventional Psychiatry Service Patient Registry

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of interventional/procedural therapies for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). These treatments include electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), racemic ketamine infusion and intranasal esketamine insufflation.

The investigators will obtain various indicators, or biomarkers, of a depressed individuals’ state before, during, and/or after these treatments. Such biomarkers include neurobehavioral testing, neuroimaging, electroencephalography, cognitive testing, vocal recordings, epi/genetic testing, and autonomic nervous system measures (i.e. “fight-or-flight” response).

The results obtained from this study may provide novel antidepressant treatment response biomarkers, with the future goal of targeting a given treatment to an individual patient (“personalized medicine”).

Trial Details

Treatment response biomarkers in TRD have been and will remain an active area of research. Interventional treatments in psychiatry, e.g. ECT, TMS, racemic ketamine infusions and intranasal esketamine insufflations, offer exciting opportunities for biomarker discovery due their procedural nature (obviating concerns for treatment non-adherence in non-supervised settings), more rapid-onset, and larger effect sizes than typically seen with traditional antidepressant medications or evidence-based psychotherapies. Although no well-replicated TRD biomarkers have been approved for standard clinical use, several potential biomarkers have been investigated across multiple modalities, i.e. neuroimaging(1,2), autonomic function(3,4), genetics(5-7), electroencephalography (EEG) (8,9), and computational analysis of behavior or speech(10). These studies have promising early results but often insufficient predictive power at the subject-level. The investigators anticipate that combinatorial, multimodal biomarkers will enhance predictive power and, as a result, improve treatment personalization in major depression. The University of Iowa Interventional Psychiatry Service Patient Registry systematically collects data from TRD patients undergoing procedural treatment(s) for major depression. First, the investigators seek to replicate and/or extend discoveries from prior investigations, e.g. TMS-induced autonomic changes as positive predictors of antidepressant efficacy. The investigators will also compare and contrast differences, not only in response to a given therapy, but also how individual subjects respond across different treatment modalities, e.g. how does functional connectivity in the brain change in response to an effective course of TMS as opposed to ECT? Such findings could inform the future development of clinical guidelines; this is especially critical as some of these treatment modalities have only recently been approved for TRD by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, e.g. intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) and intranasal esketamine insufflation. Next, a longitudinal database may also be valuable for future biomarker discovery and/or replication in independent samples, i.e. an epigenetic signature of antidepressant treatment response to an interventional modality identified by another research group. Similarly, this patient registry could be valuable for collaborative research with other institutions administering interventional treatments in psychiatry.

NCT Number NCT04480918

Data attribution

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