You’re feeling down, and your doctor or therapist has confirmed it: You have depression. Now what?
Until recently, many experts thought that your clinician could literally pick any antidepressant or type of psychotherapy at random because, with a few clinical exceptions, there was little evidence to favor one treatment over another for a given patient.
Although the holy grail of personalized therapy — be it with psychotropic drugs or psychotherapy — has proved elusive, we’ve learned a lot recently about individual factors that might predict a better response to one type of treatment over another.
Dr. Helen Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University, recently published a study in JAMA Psychiatry that identified a potential biomarker in the brain that could predict whether a depressed patient would respond better to psychotherapy or antidepressant medication.
Using PET scans, she randomized a group of depressed patients to either 12 weeks of treatment with the S.S.R.I. antidepressant Lexapro or to cognitive behavior therapy, which teaches patients to correct their negative and distorted thinking.
Over all, about 40 percent of the depressed subjects responded to either treatment. But Dr. Mayberg found striking brain differences between patients who did well with Lexapro compared with cognitive behavior therapy, and vice versa. Patients who had low activity in a brain region called the anterior insula measured before treatment responded quite well to C.B.T. but poorly to Lexapro; conversely, those with high activity in this region had an excellent response to Lexapro, but did poorly with C.B.T.
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Category(s):Depression
Source material from New York Times
