NCT05523817

Targeting Specific Brain Networks to Treat Specific Symptoms in Depression

Probing the Functional and Behavioral Impact of Precision Circuit Modulation in Neuropsychiatric Diseases

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 80 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Massachusetts General Hospital · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a way of non-invasively stimulating specific brain networks and is an established treatment for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). This proposal will reveal network mechanisms of the therapeutic effects of rTMS by investigating how stimulating each network specifically changes network connectivity and behavior. This will be done in a highly individualized manner in depressed and healthy patients, leading to more effective and more individualized treatments for depression.

Detailed description

Network models are increasingly invoked to characterize the neurobiological underpinnings of mental illnesses. Dysfunction within specific circuits promotes the formation of specific symptoms. This suggests an opportunity to treat specific symptoms by modulating specific circuits. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is capable of circuit-specific neuromodulation. It is also an established treatment for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Clinical experience suggests that rTMS treats different symptom constructs by stimulating different circuits. However, there remains a critical lack of mechanistic evidence to support putative network mechanisms of rTMS, limiting its ability to treat patients with more personalized and optimized approaches. This mechanistic proposal will first use resting-state functional connectivity (FC) MRI and customized analytic pipelines to characterize functional network topography in healthy and depressed individuals at high resolution.This data will be used to derive rTMS targets functionally situated in discrete prefrontal networks (e.g., control, default, salience, limbic/reward). Next, patients will take part in a within-subject design in which they undergo rTMS to each target on separate days. Each target will be stimulated four times on a given day, and after each stimulation changes will be measured with: (1) REST-BOLD MRI (to assess FC changes), (2) TASK-BOLD MRI (to assess changes in BOLD activation on paradigms validated to test RDoC constructs), (3) state-based questionnaires or (4) neuropsychological tests. This work will facilitate individualized neuromodulation approaches based on network topography. This will pollinate large-scale clinical trials assessing the effects of differential circuit modulation. It will also illuminate circuit-construct relationships across neuropsychiatric disorders.

Conditions

• Major Depressive Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Intermittent Theta Burst Stimulation (iTBS)	iTBS is a form of non-invasive brain stimulation used to treat depression. It works on the principles of electromagnetic induction.

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-03-12
• Primary completion: 2027-12-31
• Completion: 2028-12-31
• First posted: 2022-08-31
• Last updated: 2025-09-29

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States

Regulatory

• FDA-regulated device study