Trial reportNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2023
Chronic escitalopram in healthy volunteers has specific effects on reinforcement sensitivity: a double-blind, placebo-controlled semi-randomised study.
Trial report in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT04239339 (Serotonergic Modulation of Cognition, Emotion and Brain Activation in Healthy Volunteers), which is not on this map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
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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.
Serotonergic Modulation of Cognition, Emotion and Brain Activation in Healthy Volunteers
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Computational modelling and neural correlates of reinforcement learning following three-week escitalopram: a double-blind, placebo-controlled semi-randomised study.Translational psychiatry · 2025Trial
- General and anxiety-linked influences of acute serotonin reuptake inhibition on neural responses associated with attended visceral sensation.Translational psychiatry · 2024Trial
- Functional brain responses to emotional faces after three to five weeks of intake of escitalopram in healthy individuals: a double-blind, placebo-controlled randomised study.Scientific reports · 2024Trial
- Effects of escitalopram on synaptic density in the healthy human brain: a randomized controlled trial.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Trial
- The role of psychopharmacology and cognitive neuroscience in understanding the brain in the treatment of psychiatric disorders and neurological diseases for the benefit of society.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- The nature of depression and the biomedical model: ten questions in search of an answer.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- Antidepressant drugs have pharmacological- and time-dependent effects on reinforcement learning in healthy volunteers: An 8 weeks randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Therapeutic modulation of empathy: pharmacological, neurostimulation, and behavioral approaches.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Reframing "flat affect" and withdrawal in severe mental illness: a within-subject, culture- and medication-sensitive heuristic for social psychiatry.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Memory in Psychiatric Disorders: A Review.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Computational modeling reveals cognitive processes in simple rodent depression tests.Cell reports methods · 2025Article
- Concomitant Psychotropic Medication Is Associated with Reduced Outcomes of Trauma-Focused Psychotherapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.Psychotherapy and psychosomatics · 2025Article
- Conditioned versus innate effort-based tasks reveal divergence in antidepressant effect on motivational state in male mice.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Revisiting the Role of Serotonin in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: New Insights from Preclinical and Clinical Studies.Clinical drug investigation · 2025Review
- Cannabidiol reverses depression-like behaviors by enhancing hippocampal synaptic plasticity in rats with chronic restraint stress.Veterinary world · 2025Article
- Computational mechanisms underlying the impact of Pavlovian bias on instrumental learning in problematic social media users.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Intestinal Epithelial Serotonin as a Novel Target for Treating Disorders of Gut-Brain Interaction and Mood.Gastroenterology · 2025Article
- SSRIs: exploring controversies, conundrums, and contentions-epiphenomenon or empirical ingenuity? A comparative panorama for untangling enigma in children and youths.CNS spectrums · 2025Review
- Association of escitalopram-induced shifts in gut microbiota and sphingolipid metabolism with depression-like behavior in wistar-kyoto rats.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
16 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Several studies of the effects on cognition of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), administered either acutely or sub-chronically in healthy volunteers, have found changes in learning and reinforcement outcomes. In contrast, to our knowledge, there have been no studies of chronic effects of escitalopram on cognition in healthy volunteers. This is important in view of its clinical use in major depressive disorder (MDD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Consequently, we aimed to investigate the chronic effect of the SSRI, escitalopram, on measures of 'cold' cognition (including inhibition, cognitive flexibility, memory) and 'hot cognition' including decision-making and particularly reinforcement learning. The study, conducted at the University of Copenhagen between May 2020 and October 2021, used a double-blind placebo-controlled design with 66 healthy volunteers, semi-randomised to receive either 20 mg of escitalopram (n = 32) or placebo (n = 34), balanced for age, sex and intelligence quotient (IQ) for at least 21 days. Questionnaires, neuropsychological tests and serum escitalopram measures were taken. We analysed group differences on the cognitive measures using linear regression models as well as innovative hierarchical Bayesian modelling of the Probabilistic Reversal Learning (PRL) task. The novel and important finding was that escitalopram reduced reinforcement sensitivity compared to placebo on both the Sequential Model-Based/Model-Free task and the PRL task. We found no other significant group differences on 'cold' or 'hot' cognition. These findings demonstrate that serotonin reuptake inhibition is involved in reinforcement learning in healthy individuals. Lower reinforcement sensitivity in response to chronic SSRI administration may reflect the 'blunting' effect often reported by patients with MDD treated with SSRIs. Trial Registration: NCT04239339 .
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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.