Durability of the benefit of vagus nerve stimulation in markedly treatment-resistant major depression: a RECOVER trial report
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IMPORTANCE: Greater levels of treatment resistance in major depressive disorder (MDD) are associated with lower rates of initial benefit and higher rates of relapse (lower durability). OBJECTIVE: Characterize depressive symptoms, function, and quality of life (QoL) over 24 months of adjunctive vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) in participants with markedly treatment-resistant depression. DESIGN: Prospective, open-label, single-arm, long-term extension study (RECOVER) conducted from September 2019 to April 2025. SETTING: Outpatient. PARTICIPANTS: Adults with moderate-severe MDD with ≥ 4 failed antidepressant trials in the current episode, randomized to blinded, adjunctive VNS for 12 months, who subsequently received open-label, adjunctive VNS for 12 additional months (n = 214). INTERVENTIONS: Vagus nerve stimulation and concomitant psychotropic medications and interventional psychiatric modalities (electroconvulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and ketamine/esketamine) were characterized over the 12-month extension. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The durability of benefit achieved at 12 months was assessed at 18 and 24 months for depressive symptoms (3 scales), daily function, QoL, a tripartite composite of all 3 domains, and the Clinical Global Impression-Improvement (CGI-I) scale (overall improvement). Loss of benefit and relapse were assessed, along with the emergence of meaningful benefit in participants without benefit at 12 months. Substantial benefit (at least 50% symptom reduction from baseline; CGI-I of 1 or 2; tripartite measures with at least 2 of 3 subscales evidencing benefit) and meaningful benefit thresholds for symptoms (at least 30% reduction from baseline), function, QoL, CGI-I, and the tripartite measure were set a priori. RESULTS: Most participants with substantial benefit maintained their benefit (18-month median = 78.8%; 24-month median = 79.0% across 5 measures), as did participants with at least meaningful benefit at 12 months (18-month median = 83.1%; 24-month median = 81.3% across 7 measures). Furthermore, many participants with no meaningful benefit at 12 months achieved it at 18 (median = 30.6%) and 24 (median = 37.8%) months. The strong maintenance of benefit was not accounted for by changes in psychotropic medications or interventional psychiatric modalities. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Depressive symptom, daily function, and QoL benefits obtained after 12 months of adjunctive VNS were sustained in about 80% of participants continuing VNS. Approximately 30% with no meaningful benefit at 12 months accrued increased benefit over the subsequent year.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".