11 February 2020

EEG Determines if Antidepressants Work

People getting treated for depression often have to suffer through months of trial-and-error testing of different drugs to see which of them—if any—will help. For a long time, scientists and clinicians have hoped for a biological means of diagnosing depression or predicting which patients will do better on a given treatment. A new study takes a step toward the latter kind of prediction by finding a distinctive signature with the noninvasive technique of electroencephalography (EEG) to test who will benefit from one common antidepressant. The study followed more than 300 people with depression as they began taking the drug sertraline (Zoloft) or a placebo. A computer algorithm could discern the EEGs of those who fared well on the drug from those who did not. Trained on one group, the algorithm also effectively predicted results in several others. 


The work is preliminary and needs to be confirmed with further studies and expanded to include other treatments, such as different antidepressants, transcranial magnetic stimulation and psychotherapy. Right now doctors give patients whichever antidepressant they like best, and then—for all choices in this class of drugs—they have to wait six to eight weeks to know whether it is working or not. If the drug does not work well, it might be another six weeks before they know whether a different dose or a new drug is more effective. Meanwhile many of the people who seek medication are at risk for suicide or too depressed to function normally. Today about 40 percent of patients will respond to the first drug they are given. In the study, about 65 percent of patients’ whose EEG signature suggested they would respond well to sertraline did so.

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