Neural effects of agomelatine on reward and aversion processing.
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The effects of agomelatine on neural responses to reward and aversion in healthy volunteers.
IRAS ID
174605
Contact name
Ciara McCabe
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Reading
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from normally rewarding stimuli and is a core symptom of major depressive disorder (MDD). Research has demonstrated that people with MDD have abnormal brain responses to rewards and aversion in comparison to healthy controls. Using a paradigm involving a direct reward such as the taste of chocolate, we have shown that it is possible to delineate different neural systems supporting the representation of reward and pleasure in humans using functional neuroimaging (Rolls and McCabe 2007).
Using this paradigm, we have extended this work to investigate the effects of psychopharmacological treatments on reward and aversion processing in healthy volunteers. For example, McCabe et al., (2010) found that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), citalopram, reduced brain responses to both rewards and aversion, in healthy volunteers. This has important implications regarding how antidepressant treatments interact with the reward centre of the brain and how they may affect anhedonia. More recently, we examined the effects of a dopamine-noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor, bupropion, in healthy volunteers at the University of Reading. This was achieved using an adapted version of the reward paradigm, which better separates wanting and liking aspects of reward and aversion processing.
Using our newly advanced reward paradigm, this study aims is to investigate the effects of agomelatine on the neural responses to reward and aversion in healthy, never depressed, volunteers.
REC name
South Central - Berkshire B Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/SC/0229
Date of REC Opinion
22 May 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion