Media outlets including Cleveland.com and Cleveland’s WKYC News highlighted a new University of Cincinnati clinical trial funded by an approximately $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health to test two new nonpharmacological treatments for teens and young adults with depression.
“We are opening up an array of interventions that can be newer, more innovative and lower risk than conventional treatments we have been using,” said Fabiano Nery, MD, PhD, the trial’s principal investigator, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience in UC’s College of Medicine and a UC Health physician.
The trial will test a supplement of an amino acid called N-acetylcysteine (NAC) that has been used for more than 30 years for a range of conditions and is now being studied in a wide range of psychiatric conditions.
Additionally, the trial will test a psychotherapy intervention called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). This structured form of therapy is based on the pillars of training your mind to be more mindful and challenging your own thoughts to influence emotions.
“MBCT has been shown to be very good for people with depression, especially those that have had a lot of episodes,” Nery said. “It helps them to decrease relapses in depression, to get them stable, but it has also been shown to help decrease anxiety, to decrease irritability and to improve depressive symptoms.”
Read the Cleveland.com article.
Watch or read the WKYC News report.
For more information on the trial and more eligibility requirements, please contact trial coordinator Khalid Yusuf at 513-558-5479 or yusufkd@ucmail.uc.edu. Fill out an online screening questionnaire.
Featured illustration at top of children in silhouette walking with colorful backpacks. Photo/A-Digit/iStock.
