Does the Addition of Pindolol Accelerate the Response to Electroconvulsive Therapy in Patients with Major Depression? A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Pilot Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is evidence that addition of pindolol, a beta-adrenergic/5-hydroxytryptamine-1A antagonist, can accelerate the onset of action of antidepressant medications. The purpose of this study was to determine whether pindolol administration can induce a rapid improvement in depressive symptoms in patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) within six ECT treatments. A total of 20 patients with DSM-IV-diagnosed major depression who were undergoing a course of ECT as the clinically indicated treatment were recruited. They were neuroleptic, lithium, and antidepressant free for at least 1 week before the study. Of the 20 patients, 9 patients had been randomly assigned to receive pindolol 2.5 mg three times daily, and 11 patients received identical placebo three times daily for the duration of the first 6 ECT treatments. One of 9 patients in the pindolol group and 4 of 11 patients in the placebo group dropped out of the study. Using an outcome measure of a score < or =12 on the 29-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D), the authors found that four (50%) of eight patients responded to the combination treatment of ECT and pindolol within six ECT treatments. In contrast, none (0%) of seven patients who received placebo responded to ECT treatment. Furthermore, both mean 29-item HAM-D and Clinical Global Impression Scale scores after the sixth ECT treatment were significantly lower in patients treated with pindolol compared with those treated with placebo. However, the number of total ECT treatments within a course or the overall efficacy of ECT treatment was not altered by the addition of pindolol. The results of this study suggest that within six ECT treatments, pindolol administration hastens antidepressant effects of ECT in some depressed patients.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".