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The Effect of a Six Week Intensified Pharmacological Treatment for Bipolar Depression Compared to Treatment as Usual in Subjects Who Had a First-time Treatment Failure on Their First-line Treatment.
Sponsor: Dr. Inge Winter
Summary
Bipolar disorders affect approximately 4.5 million people across the European Union (EU) and are associated with high annual healthcare and societal costs. Bipolar disorder I and II represent disorders that cause extreme fluctuation in a person's mood, energy, and ability to function, in which symptoms of (hypo)mania and depression alternate. The depressive episodes of bipolar disorders are often referred to as bipolar depression (BD). In other words: it is a phase/state of the disorder. For many patients with BD, the depressive polarity is often more pervasive and more debilitating than manic states, with estimates that depressed mood accounts for up to two-thirds of the time spent unwell, even with treatment. The burden of not received an effective treatment for BD is high: more severe psychopathology, higher rates of unemployment, more hospitalisations, lower quality of life, lower cognitive functioning, risk of suicide, comorbidities and poorer social and occupational functioning and thus more carer burden. For BD, the treatment guidelines are very heterogeneous, amongst other reasons because the disease is heterogeneous and treatments should be tailored to the patients. There is no clear treatment algorithm and it cannot yet be predicted which treatment will be effective. Especially the place of adjunctive antidepressants is under debate. Usually, for psychiatric disorders (including bipolar disorder), a patient is considered to be treatment-resistant is two medicinal treatments have been tried (in sufficient duration and dosage) without sufficient success. For BD, there is no consensus on when to consider a patient as treatment-resistant, but the most common definition is after one prior treatment failure. This raises the research question whether adjunctive antidepressants to treat BD should be introduced earlier in the treatment. Additionally, The INTENSIFY trial is part of the larger Horizon 2021 project, with the central goal of paving the way for a shift towards a treatment decision-making process tailored for the individual at risk for treatment resistance. To that end, we aim to establish evidence-based criteria to make decisions of early intense treatment in individuals at risk for treatment resistance across the major psychiatric disorders of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression.
Official title: A Randomised, Controlled Trial to Investigate the Effect of a Six Week Intensified Pharmacological Treatment for Bipolar Depression Compared to Treatment as Usual in Subjects Who Had a First-time Treatment Failure on Their First-line Treatment.
Key Details
Gender
All
Age Range
18 Years - Any
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Enrollment
418
Start Date
2025-02-11
Completion Date
2028-06-30
Last Updated
2025-09-26
Healthy Volunteers
No
Conditions
Interventions
Escitalopram
See arm description
Sertraline
See arm description
Venlafaxine
See arm description
Lithium
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Valproate acid
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Quetiapine
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Bupropion
See arm description
Locations (13)
Medical University Innsbruck
Innsbruck, Austria
Universitätsklinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie Bielefeld
Bielefeld, Germany
LWL-Klinik Dortmund, Bereich Forschung & Wissenschaft
Dortmund, Germany
University Hospital Frankfurt am Main - Goethe University
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie der Universitätsmedizin Mainz
Mainz, Germany
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Münster, Germany
Eginition hospital, department of psychiatry
Athens, Greece
Universita degli Studi di Brescia
Brescia, Italy
University of Cagliari
Cagliari, Italy
Università degli studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli
Naples, Italy
Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria "Città della Salute e della Scienza di Torino"
Turin, Italy
Fundació Clínic per a la Recerca Biomèdica
Barcelona, Spain
King's College London, Psychiatry & Cognitive Neuroscience
London, United Kingdom