Psychomotor Changes in Major Depressive Disorder during Sertraline Treatment

Abstract

Background: There is a relative scarcity of studies on major depressive disorder that use objective assessment methods to explore the psychomotor effects of antidepressants. Striatal dopaminergic disturbances are known to be involved in the pathogenesis of major depressive disorder that is associated with psychomotor retardation. Because of its additional dopaminergic mechanism, the psychomotor effects of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor sertraline merit further exploration. Methods: In 19 patients diagnosed with a current major depressive episode, clinical variables and graphic motor activity were assessed applying digitized figure copying tasks during a 6-week regimen of sertraline. Patients’ baseline and weekly psychomotor performance was compared with the outcomes of 22 healthy, unmedicated controls. Results: Patients’ psychomotor slowing had improved after 6 weeks on sertraline as reflected by reductions in initiation and movement times on the simple line and figure copying tasks and decreased initiation times for the complex figure copying task relative to their baseline outcomes. Conclusions: The current study found evidence pointing to potential beneficial effects of sertraline after a 6-week treatment period in the lower-order cognitive and motor components involved in the graphic motor performance of depressed patients. The present findings are discussed in terms of the mechanism of action of sertraline.

Increased Force Variability Is Associated with Altered Modulation of the Motorneuron Pool Activity in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

“…Such studies, in combination with EMG recording, will allow us to better understand altered central-to-peripheral mechanisms related to both motor and the defining symptoms of ASD. Lastly, antihypertensive and antidepressant medications have unclear effects on psychomotor functioning, with studies documenting both improvement and decline [58,59,60,61]. However, it is unlikely performance was impacted in participants taking either of these medications given that these medications appear to have minimal effect on basic motor functioning and peripheral processes [62].…”

Participation of brainstem monoaminergic nuclei in behavioral depression

“…The first concerns the lack of antidepressant effect of stimulant drugs, such as amphetamine. Although depressed patients have reduced levels of daily activity which are restored by successful antidepressant treatment (Merrick, 1992; Willner, 1997; Demyttenaere et al, 2005; Schrijvers et al, 2009), stimulants, even though they markedly suppress LC neural activity (Akaoka et al, 1991), have generally not been found to be clinically effective antidepressants and produce false positives in animal screening tests since they reverse forced swim immobility (Porsolt et al, 1978). A possible reason for this is that they can also activate other central stress nuclei, such as the paraventricular hypothalamus (Swerdlow et al, 1993; Armario, 2010), which aggravate depression and may offset any positive effect of the behavioral stimulation.…”

Distinguishing Subgroups Based on Psychomotor Functioning among Patients with Major Depressive Disorder

“…In addition, a local database of healthy controls was used to create an age-matched healthy control group (36 women, 15 men; mean age of 55.2 [±15.9] years), collected during previous similar psychomotor studies by our group, applying exactly the same fine psychomotor measurement methods [18, 33, 34]. …”