Clinical Trial: Understanding Brain Reward Responses in Individuals With Major Depressive Disorder

Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Completed
Study Type: Observational

Official Title: Neuroimaging Studies of Reward Processing in Depression

Brief Summary: This study will examine brain responses associated with reinforcement and reward tasks in individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD).

Detailed Summary:

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a severe form of depression that can significantly interfere with an individual's thoughts, behavior, mood, and physical health. People who suffer from MDD may experience anhedonia, or the inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences. Such individuals do not respond to motivational rewards in the same way as do individuals who are not depressed. Anhedonia has been recognized as a core symptom of depression and it is not always remedied with antidepressant medication. Abnormal brain activity and processing may be the underlying cause of depression and specifically anhedonia. A better understanding of the brain mechanisms of depression may lead to the development of new effective medications or psychological treatments.

Event-related potential (ERP), which measures electrical activity in the brain, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which uses scanned images to illustrate changes in brain activity, are two techniques that can identify abnormal areas of brain processing. The purpose of this study is to use ERP and fMRI to compare brain activity that is related to reward processing in individuals with MDD versus individuals without MDD.

This study will consist of 3 study visits; visits will be scheduled as close together as possible. At the first study visit, potential participants will be assessed with the SCID (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV), which will identify individuals with the diagnostic criteria for MDD. A control group of non-depressed individuals will also be enrolled in the study. During the second and third study visits, participants will take part in a monetary reinforcement reward task followed by a signal detection reward task. Brain activity of all participants will be monitored during both tasks. During the second study visit, ER
Sponsor: Mclean Hospital

Current Primary Outcome:

• Performance on Monetary Incentive Delay task [ Time Frame: Given once during the second session for half an hour, and once during the third session for half an hour ]
  This task features balanced incentive delivery and analytic strategies designed to identify activity specific to anticipation or consumption of incentives.
• Signal detection reward task [ Time Frame: Given once during the second session for fifteen minutes, and once during the third session for fifteen minutes ]
  This reward task provides an objective assessment of hedonic capacity. Due to the probabilistic nature of the task, participants cannot infer which stimulus is more advantageous based on the outcome of single trials but need to integrate reinforcement history over time to optimize behavior.

Original Primary Outcome:

Current Secondary Outcome:

Original Secondary Outcome:

Information By: Mclean Hospital

Dates:
Date Received: September 14, 2005
Date Started: April 2005
Date Completion:
Last Updated: April 16, 2014
Last Verified: April 2014