Clinical trials

Deficits in motivation and pleasure are common in depression, and thought to be caused by alterations in the ways in which the brain anticipates, evaluates, and adaptively uses reward-related information. However, reward processing is a complex, multi-circuit phenomenon, and the precise neural mechanisms that contribute to the absence or reduction of pleasure and motivation are not well understood. Variation in the clinical presentation of depression has long been a rule rather than an exception, including individual variation in symptoms, severity, and treatment response. This heterogeneity complicates understanding of depression and thwarts progress toward disease classification and treatment planning. Discovery of depression-specific biomarkers that account for neurobiological variation that presumably underlies distinct clinical manifestations is critical to this larger effort.

Depression is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, conferring substantial healthcare and societal costs. By studying methods to non-invasively target neural circuitry involved in reward responsivity, information generated by this project will improve understanding of the circuit alterations that underlie motivation and pleasure deficits in depression, and could also lead to the development of biologically-based markers of neurostimulation-based treatment response.