Trial reportPsychological medicine2025
A common symptom geometry of mood improvement under sertraline and placebo associated with distinct neural patterns.
Trial report in Psychological medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 4 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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Framework for Advancing Mechanistic Neurobehavioral Biomarkers in Psychiatry.Biological psychiatry · 2026Review
- A common symptom geometry of mood improvement under sertraline and placebo associated with distinct neural patterns - CORRIGENDUM.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Mystical Experience Induced by Esketamine Treatment: A Real-World Observational Study.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Ketamine disrupts consciousness in healthy participants in relation with psychotic-like symptoms.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
- Update of
Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundUnderstanding the mechanisms of major depressive disorder (MDD) improvement is a key challenge to determining effective personalized treatments.
methodsTo identify a data-driven pattern of clinical improvement in MDD and to quantify neural-to-symptom relationships according to antidepressant treatment, we performed a secondary analysis of the publicly available dataset EMBARC (Establishing Moderators and Biosignatures of Antidepressant Response in Clinical Care). In EMBARC, participants with MDD were treated either by sertraline or placebo for 8 weeks (Stage 1), and then switched to bupropion according to clinical response (Stage 2). We computed a univariate measure of clinical improvement through a principal component (PC) analysis on the variations of individual items of four clinical scales measuring depression, anxiety, suicidal ideas, and manic-like symptoms. We then investigated how initial clinical and neural factors predicted this measure during Stage 1 by running a linear model for each brain parcel's resting-state global brain connectivity (GBC) with individual improvement scores during Stage 1.
resultsThe first PC (PC1) was similar across treatment groups at stages 1 and 2, suggesting a shared pattern of symptom improvement. PC1 patients' scores significantly differed according to treatment, whereas no difference in response was evidenced between groups with the Clinical Global Impressions Scale. Baseline GBC correlated with Stage 1 PC1 scores in the sertraline but not in the placebo group.Using data-driven reduction of symptom scales, we identified a common profile of symptom improvement with distinct intensity between sertraline and placebo.
conclusionsMapping from data-driven symptom improvement onto neural circuits revealed treatment-responsive neural profiles that may aid in optimal patient selection for future trials.
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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.