Amsterdam UMC and Radboudumc Develop Algorithm to Predict Patient Response to Antidepressant Treatment

The results of the research by Amsterdam UMC in collaboration with Radboudumc have been published in the scientific journal American Journal of Psychiatry

Amsterdam UMC reports: ‘The researchers have developed a method that can predict whether patients will benefit from treatment with the antidepressant sertraline, even before treatment begins. They did this based on data from a previous study conducted in the United States. MRI scans and clinical data were taken from 229 patients with moderate to severe depression. The scans were made before and one week after the start of treatment with sertraline, or a placebo. The researchers from Amsterdam UMC used an algorithm, a mathematical formula, on this data. Their validation shows that the algorithm can already identify 2/3 of the patients who would normally take medication in vain. Reneman: “With this method we can prevent the number of ‘incorrect’ prescriptions of sertraline after just one week, and thus provide better quality of care for the patient. Because the medicine also has side effects.”

The right medicine much faster

Eric Ruhé, psychiatrist at Radboud university medical center, says about the algorithm: “During the first measurement, the algorithm indicated that a lot of blood flow in the part of the brain where emotions are located was of predictive value as to whether the medicine would work. And at the second measurement, one week after the start of treatment, the severity of the complaints was the indicator.”
In the future, this new method can support psychiatrists in providing patients with a more personal and effective treatment plan. It is now mostly a matter of guessing whether the medicine will work. The patient is given the medication and after 6 to 8 weeks it is checked whether it is working. If the symptoms are not reduced, the patient is given another antidepressant and this is sometimes repeated several times. This standard method often takes many months. It also saves costs for society, because as long as the patient continues to suffer from serious depressive symptoms, he or she cannot participate in society. The World Health Organization (WHO) expects depression to be the largest source of disease burden worldwide by 2030.

Follow-up research

One in three depressed patients still shows no improvement in symptoms after various treatment steps. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a solution that allows a faster determination of the effectiveness of antidepressants in severe depression. The researchers will improve the algorithm in the coming period by adding extra information to the algorithm. There is also a clinical trial underway, the data of which will be used for further validation of the algorithm.’

Read the research American Journal of Psychiatry.

2024-02-10 15:54:22
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