Congratulations to Vibe G. Frøkjær and Annika Læbo Rasmussen for receiving from Mental Health Services, Capital Region of Denmark a PhD stipend (worth 2,176,716 DKK) for the 3-year project 'Optimizing antidepressant treatment for women on the pill: From mechanism to precision psychiatry', which will be Annika's PhD project.
Brief description of the project:
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is an enormous public health problem and there is an urgent need for optimized prevention and treatment strategies. Strikingly, MDD is twice as frequent in women as in men across the reproductive age, which may reflect hormonal contributions including use of oral hormonal contraceptives, i.e. “the pill”. We do not know if using the pill in a depressed state interferes with antidepressant treatment even though about 50% of depressed women use it. Our group has recently highlighted that healthy women who use the pill differ markedly from non- users in terms of molecular brain architecture known to be a key target for antidepressant treatments, which may be critical for the (non) efficacy of standard treatments such as SSRIs. In particular such brain architecture, i.e. the serotonin 4 receptor settings, which sits with high density in key hubs of the reward system, appears to be critical for hedonic health as captured by sexual desire in women with MDD (findings first authored by PhD candidate Annika Rasmussen). We here propose a randomized clinical trial with an integrated brain imaging part to determine (a) if serotonin 4 receptor architecture is sensitive to withdrawal from the pill (i.e. if it is reversible), and (b) if women with a depressive episode who use the pill benefit or not from discontinuing it while receiving standard SSRI treatment. The work will be carried out in a strong cross-disciplinary research group.