Adriane Soehner, Ph.D.

Fellow In Child & Adolescent Depression

Project Details

PROJECT TITLE

Rapid-Acting Antidepressant Effects of Selective Slow Wave Sleep Deprivation in Depressed Youth

PROJECT SUMMARY

Safe, tolerable rapid-acting antidepressant strategies are urgently needed for youth. Non-pharmacologic chronotherapeutic interventions, such as sleep deprivation, may be a viable and safer means of rapidly improving depression in youth. Sleep deprivation (SD) elicits an acute antidepressant response in 50% of depressed patients. While effects are transient in most adults, reversing after the next night of sleep, pilot studies of total SD studies in depressed teens report similar response rates and, promisingly, suggest more sustained clinical benefits. Despite encouraging findings, SD is not widely-used in depressed youth, perhaps due to patient reluctance to engage in this intervention. Methodological advances now make it easier to non-invasively reduce specific aspects of sleep abnormal in depression, such as non-rapid eye-movement sleep slow waves. Among depressed adults, selective slow-wave SD (SW-SD) had the advantage of improving depression without disrupting sleep duration, but remains untested in youth. Among depressed adolescents, this study will test the antidepressant effects of SW- SD, and the extent to which SW-SD targets an established neural marker of antidepressant response. Resting-state neuroimaging data collected before and after SW-SD will allow us to assess a mechanistic neural target of SW-SD, and determine the extent to which changes in depression due to SW-SD correspond to changes in this target. Outcomes from this study could support the use of SW-SD to bolster the effects of existing antidepressant therapies to achieve faster remission in youth.

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