Trial reportMolecular psychiatry2018
Evidence for neuroplastic compensation in the cerebral cortex of persons with depressive illness.
Trial report in Molecular psychiatry, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of antidepressant medications on brain tissue microstructure in persistent depressive disorder across two randomized controlled trials.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2026Trial
- A Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) study of medication and CBT sequencing in the treatment of pediatric anxiety disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2021Trial
- Effects of Online Bodyweight High-Intensity Interval Training Intervention and Health Education on the Mental Health and Cognition of Sedentary Young Females.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Trial
- Trial
- Pretreatment and early-treatment cortical thickness is associated with SSRI treatment response in major depressive disorder.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2018Trial
- Neuromodulation for restoring and amplifying brain function.Nature neuroscience · 2026Review
- Article
- Female chronic social defeat stress (Frontiers in systems biology · 2026Article
- Evidence for cognitive compensation mechanism in the postoperative delirium: a prospective multi-modal neuroimaging cohort study.Brain imaging and behavior · 2025Article
- Medial prefrontal neuroplasticity during extended-release naltrexone treatment of opioid use disorder - a longitudinal structural magnetic resonance imaging study.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Sex Determines Anterior Cingulate Cortex Cortical Thickness in the Course of Depression.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- Associations between cortical thickness and parasympathetic nervous system functioning during middle childhood.Psychophysiology · 2023Article
- Article
- Neural plasticity and depression treatment.IBRO neuroscience reports · 2023Article
- Novel Antidepressant Mechanism of Ginsenoside Rg1 in Regulating the Dysfunction of the Glutamatergic System in Astrocytes.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Mild behavioral impairment linked to progression to Alzheimer's disease and cortical thinning in amnestic mild cognitive impairment.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2022Article
- Synaptic Microenvironment in Depressive Disorder: Insights from Synaptic Plasticity.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2021Review
- Modulation of inhibitory control networks relate to clinical response following ketamine therapy in major depression.Translational psychiatry · 2020Article
- Normalizing the Abnormal: Do Antipsychotic Drugs Push the Cortex Into an Unsustainable Metabolic Envelope?Schizophrenia bulletin · 2020Review
- Cortical Thickness in Alcohol Dependent Patients With Apathy.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We yoked anatomical brain magnetic resonance imaging to a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (RCT) of antidepressant medication for 10-week's duration in patients with dysthymia. The RCT study design mitigated ascertainment bias by randomizing patients to receive either duloxetine or placebo, and it supported true causal inferences about treatment effects on the brain by controlling treatment assignment experimentally. We acquired 121 anatomical scans: at baseline and end point in 41 patients and once in 39 healthy controls. At baseline, patients had diffusely thicker cortices than did healthy participants, and patients who had thicker cortices had proportionately less severe symptoms. During the trial, symptoms improved significantly more in medication-compared with placebo-treated patients; concurrently, thicknesses in medication-treated patients declined toward values in healthy controls, but they increased slightly, away from control values, in placebo-treated patients. Changes in symptom severity during the trial mediated the association of treatment assignment with the change in thickness, suggesting that the beneficial effects of medication on symptom severity were at least partially responsible for normalizing cortical thickness. Together our findings suggest that baseline cortical hypertrophy in medication-free patients likely represented a compensatory, neuroplastic response that attenuated symptom severity. Medication then reduced symptoms and lessened the need for compensation, thereby normalizing thickness. This is to the best of our knowledge the first study to report within an RCT a differential change in cortical morphology during medication treatment for depressive illness and the first to provide within an RCT in vivo evidence for the presence of neuroanatomical plasticity in humans.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.