A new approach for objective monitoring of the pharmacological-treatment response in recurrent depressions

Depressive disorders are among the most important psychiatric problems. In everyday clinical practice, their symptoms and, respectively, their response to pharmacological treatment are both evaluated and measured subjectively. In the present paper, we apply a new approach for objective monitoring of the pharmacological-treatment response in patients with recurrent depressions. The applied method is user-friendly, easy-to-perform, and not time-consuming (1 test = 1 min), thus allowing repeatable examinations of many patients. The results show that the pre-treatment examination could discriminate between patients and healthy controls by revealing objectively measurable psychomotor retardation (in terms of locomotor hypo-activity and brady-reactivity) in the depressive group. After effective psychopharmacological treatment in a psychiatric clinic, the revealed psychomotor retardation is significantly improved (although not fully normalized) during the post-treatment examination at the time of discharge. The conclusion is that the new approach is reliable and sensitive enough to serve as a surrogate pharmacodynamic biomarker in patients with recurrent depressions.