Effects of Electroconvulsive Therapy and Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Serum Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Levels in Patients with Depression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels are decreased in individuals with depression and increase following antidepressant treatment. The objective of this study is to compare pre- and post-treatment serum BDNF levels in patients with drug-resistant major depressive disorder (MDD) who received either electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) or repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). It is hypothesized that non-pharmacological treatments also increase serum BDNF levels. METHODS: This was a prospective, single-blind study comparing pre- and post-treatment serum BDNF levels of 29 patients with drug-resistant MDD who received ECT or rTMS treatment. Serum BDNF levels were measured 1 week prior to and 1 week after treatment using the sandwich ELISA technique. Depression severity was measured 1 week before and 1 week after treatment using the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. Two-sided normal distribution paired t-test analysis was used to compare pre- and post-treatment BDNF concentration and illness severity. Bivariate correlations using Pearson's coefficient assessed the relationship between post-treatment BDNF levels and post-treatment depression severity. RESULTS: There was no significant difference in serum BDNF levels before and after ECT, although concentrations tended to increase from a baseline mean of 9.95-12.29 ng/ml after treatment (p = 0.137). Treatment with rTMS did not significantly alter BDNF concentrations (p = 0.282). Depression severity significantly decreased following both ECT (p = 0.003) and rTMS (p < 0.001). Post-treatment BDNF concentration was not significantly correlated with post-treatment depression severity in patients who received either ECT (r = -0.133, p = 0.697) or rTMS (r = 0.374, p = 0.126). It is important to note that these results are based on the small number of patients included in this study. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that ECT and rTMS may not exert their clinical effects by altering serum BDNF levels in patients with drug-resistant MDD. Serum BDNF concentration may not be a biomarker of ECT or rTMS treatment response.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".