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Neuroimaging, genetic, clinical, and demographic predictors of treatment response in patients with social anxiety disorder

Author

  • Andreas Frick
  • Jonas Engman
  • Iman Alaie
  • Johannes Björkstrand
  • Malin Gingnell
  • Elna Marie Larsson
  • Elias Eriksson
  • Kurt Wahlstedt
  • Mats Fredrikson
  • Tomas Furmark

Summary, in English

Background: Correct prediction of treatment response is a central goal of precision psychiatry. Here, we tested the predictive accuracy of a variety of pre-treatment patient characteristics, including clinical, demographic, molecular genetic, and neuroimaging markers, for treatment response in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD). Methods: Forty-seven SAD patients (mean±SD age 33.9 ± 9.4 years, 24 women) were randomized and commenced 9 weeks’ Internet-delivered cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) combined either with the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) escitalopram (20 mg daily [10 mg first week], SSRI+CBT, n = 24) or placebo (placebo+CBT, n = 23). Treatment responders were defined from the Clinical Global Impression-Improvement scale (CGI-I ≤ 2). Before treatment, patients underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging and the Multi-Source Interference Task taxing cognitive interference. Support vector machines (SVMs) were trained to separate responders from nonresponders based on pre-treatment neural reactivity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), amygdala, and occipital cortex, as well as molecular genetic, demographic, and clinical data. SVM models were tested using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. Results: The best model separated treatment responders (n = 24) from nonresponders based on pre-treatment dACC reactivity (83% accuracy, P = 0.001). Responders had greater pre-treatment dACC reactivity than nonresponders especially in the SSRI+CBT group. No other variable was associated with clinical response or added predictive accuracy to the dACC SVM model. Limitations: Small sample size, especially for genetic analyses. No replication or validation samples were available. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that treatment outcome predictions based on neural cingulate activity, at the individual level, outperform genetic, demographic, and clinical variables for medication-assisted Internet-delivered CBT, supporting the use of neuroimaging in precision psychiatry.

Publishing year

2020

Language

English

Pages

230-237

Publication/Series

Journal of Affective Disorders

Volume

261

Links

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Elsevier

Topic

  • Health Sciences
  • Psychology (excluding Applied Psychology)

Keywords

  • CBT
  • Pattern recognition
  • Personalized medicine
  • Social phobia
  • SSRI
  • SVM

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0165-0327