First positive results on early detection of non-responders in depression

In June 2011 the Alan Turing Institute Almere (ATIA) started a research collaboration with Research Institute Brainclinics in Nijmegen. 

Brainclinics is a psychologist practice and research organization, specialized in diagnostics and treatment of ADHD/ADD and Depression. Brainclinics has developed a successful treatment for depression that combines repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) and psychotherapy. ATIA has assisted Brainclinics in improving the detection of patients that will probably not benefit (the so-called non-responders) from this combined therapy.

“The ATIA advanced analytics have almost doubled the detection of non-responders (the so called specificity), while still obtaining a 90% responder detection rate (or sensitivity)” says Martijn Arns (director and chief scientist of Research Institute Brainclinics). “In doing so they also highlighted the importance of variables that looked promising in the clinic, but did not reach significant explanatory value with mainstream statistical analyses. This will generate new hypotheses about patterns of brain dysfunction in these non-responders and guide the search for new neuromodulatory therapeutic interventions to treat them”.
The next step in the collaboration between the two institutes will be to publish these results as proof of concept and to validate them in a prospective sample.

Download the entire paper here.