Escitalopram therapy effective against major depressive disorder: Study

At baseline (visit 1, pre-treatment), one week (visit 2, one week after the start of the therapy), and six weeks (visit 3, after the 6-week escitalopram treatment), researchers gathered resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 20 unmedicated major depressive patients.

The key findings of this study were:

1. The study's findings showed that, in comparison to healthy volunteers, MDD patients' global average and modal controllability were considerably higher and lower, respectively.

2. Additionally, depression patients' frontoparietal network's modal controllability rank was substantially lower than that of healthy participants in comparison.

3. However, the frontoparietal network and default mode network controllability of MDD patients were constantly modified to the level of healthy participants during the course of the escitalopram treatment.

4. The findings of this study also showed that, as escitalopram therapy progressed, changes in global average and modal controllability measures may be used to predict changes in the clinical ratings of MDD patients.

In conclusion, potential brain controllability-based biomarkers that may be expanded to predict and understand the effects of various therapies for different neurological and psychiatric illnesses are needed to mechanistically understand and predict the effects of escitalopram therapy for depression.

Reference: 

Fang, F., Godlewska, B., Cho, R. Y., Savitz, S. I., Selvaraj, S., & Zhang, Y. (2022). Effects of escitalopram therapy on functional brain controllability in major depressive disorder. In Journal of Affective Disorders (Vol. 310, pp. 68–74). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2022.04.123