Our group publishes a paper in Science Advances where we predict response to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in depression from pre-treatment fMRI activity encoding weighted prediction errors in the striatum and amygdala.
Depression affects more than 300 million people worldwide, and while CBT can be an effective treatment for depression it does not work for everyone, with only around 45% of patients benefitting from it. At present, it is not possible to tell in advance who is going to benefit from CBT and who is not. Notably, the lack of a mechanistic understanding of treatment response has hindered identification of predictive biomarkers. To obtain mechanistically meaningful fMRI predictors of CBT response, we capitalize on pretreatment neural activity encoding a weighted reward prediction error (RPE), which is implicated in the acquisition and processing of feedback information during probabilistic learning.
The paper itself can be accessed here: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaav4962
For a BBC Radio 4 interview with Dr. Queirazza visit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b4x4
A press release associated with this article can be found here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_658957_en.html
