Majör Depresyonda Duygu Reaktivitesinin Antidepresan Tedavi ile Değişimi

Abstract

As 25-30% of major depression patients do not respond to the antidepressant treatments, researchers have focused on clues that can be used to predict the antidepressant response. Studies that involve tasks of emotional processing, reveal promising results in terms of detecting the changes related to treatment even in the first week and they suggest that these early changes may predict antidepressant response. Emotional reactivity (ER) is a fast and short lived response to an emotional stimulus. There are many reports that showed the inhibition of ER in depressed patients but the studies which have investigated the relationship of the treatment and ER is scarce. In this study, we aimed to assess the change of ER during antidepressant treatment. The patients (n=30) and the healthy controls (n=29) were evaluated before the treatment and two weeks after the treatment. The patient group (n=13) was evaluated for the third time in the eighth week of treatment. 45 pictures selected from International Affective Picture System (IAPS) to build the three conditions (positive-neutral- negative). The participants received acoustic stimuli to be evaluated with respect to emotion modulated startle (EMS) reflex. Besides the self reports of the patients in valance and arousability scores are collected to determine the subjective experience of patients. Analyses showed that the patients' startle reflexes are not affected by emotional stimuli in the beginning of the treatment and after two weeks. But in the eighth week the patients responses started to change with emotional stimuli and show a linear pattern among the three conditions, which is similar to healthy controls. Although the small number of the participants did not allowed us for assessing the relationship between EMS and treatment response, our results suggest that EMS can be a putative state dependent biomarker.