Association of a corticotropin-releasing hormone receptor 1 haplotype and antidepressant treatment response in Mexican-Americans.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Desipramine and Fluoxetine in this randomized controlled trial publication.

There are well-replicated, independent lines of evidence supporting a role for corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) in the pathophysiology of depression.

CRH receptor 1 (CRHR1), which the researchers first mapped in the brain in 1994, has been implicated in the treatment of depression and anxiety.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, both men and women.

Subjects were included into the study if they had a diagnosis of depression without other confounding medical or psychiatric diagnoses or treatments.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled.

Because people in this Desipramine study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Desipramine, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Desipramine group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Patients were classified into a high-anxiety (HA) group if their HAM-A score was 18 or higher and in a low-anxiety (LA) group if their HAM-A score was less than 18.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Antidepressive Agents, Anxiety, Depressive Disorder, Desipramine, Fluoxetine, Genetic Markers and Genetic Predisposition to Disease.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Desipramine and Fluoxetine.

The publication is from 2004 (Molecular psychiatry), a journal based in England.

More context: all human trials.