Connectivity Affecting the Antidepressant REsponse Study
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02332291. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
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Official title
Connectivity Affecting the Antidepressant REsponse (The CAARE Study)
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
It can be difficult to achieve remission in individuals with late-life depression (LLD) and they often require aggressive treatment. This challenge is in part due to age-related vascular changes that are common in LLD. Successful antidepressant treatment involve changes across affective, cognitive, and default mode networks. We hypothesize that in LLD, vascular disease adversely affects response to antidepressants by disrupting connectivity of these networks. The primary goal of this project is to characterize how focal vascular damage affects regional connectivity and response to antidepressants. Based on past work and pilot data, we a priori focus on the cingulum bundle and uncinate fasciculus. These key fiber bundles connect frontal, temporal, and cingulate regions involved in cognition and affective responses. Our central hypothesis is that ischemic damage to the cingulum bundle and uncinate fasciculus contributes to structural and functional connectivity deficits of those tracts. This results in a disconnection effect that alters the function of connected regions. In turn, this increases the risk of a poor response to antidepressants. Our approach is to enroll up to 130 adults over age 60 years with a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder. Subjects will complete clinical evaluation, cognitive testing, and MRI/functional MRI (fMRI) sessions, including an fMRI emotional oddball task that includes attentional and affective components. Participants will be stratified by cerebral lesion severity and randomized in a 2:1 ratio to a double-blinded 8-week trial of escitalopram or matching placebo. Those who do not remit will transition to an 8-week trial of open-label bupropion, an antidepressant with a different mechanism of action. This will allow us to determine if different and distinct circuit deficits affect response to antidepressants with different mechanisms of action while also accounting for the placebo response.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT02332291
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Phase 4
- Enrollment
- 95 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 60 Years and older
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Healthy volunteers not accepted
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Mar 31, 2015
- Primary completion
- Jul 31, 2020
- Completion
- Jul 31, 2020
- Last update posted
- Sep 20, 2021
2015 – 2020
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital | Nashville | Tennessee | 37212 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02332291, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Sep 20, 2021 · Synced Sep 10, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT02332291 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.