Save the date to the upcoming seminar on psychiatry research by speaker from KI:s doctoral course (http://kiwas.ki.se/katalog/kursplan/show/2304).
The seminar is open to everyone.
Depression is one of the major contributors to the worldwide burden of illness. In part, this is because depression is often a long-term chronic illness with repeated relapses. The maintenance of anytreatment effects is therefore of paramount importance to the long-term outcome. For instance, the risk of relapse after responding to an antidepressant and then stopping it is very high. However, as there are no reliable markers to predict who will relapse after discontinuing antidepressants, this represents a difficult situation for patients and clinicans alike.
This talk will introduce the problem and the current state of the field, and then describe the AIDA study, which attempted to identify neurobehavioural predictors of depression relapse after antidepressant discontinuation. It examined patients who had remitted on antidepressant treatments before and after discontinuing their medication.
So far, two measures appear to index relapse risk beyond standard clinical measures: emotion-induced frontal asymmetry in the alpha band, and a computational measure of the decision to invest effort to obtain rewards.