Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is one of the most common and severe mental health illnesses reported in youth. There is now growing concern over the prescription of antidepressants, which although may be effective for adults, have not only been found to have modest efficacy in MDD youth, but have also been reported as inducing harmful side-effects such as an increase in suicidal thoughts, creating an urgent need to explore for other potential treatment options. A neurostimulation treatment called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has been found to be effective for adults with MDD, with the added benefit of being associated with little to no side-effects. However, rTMS treatment has yet to be thoroughly investigated in youth MDD. Along with a need to find new treatments, there is also a need to explore for potential biomarkers that can be indicative as to whether a youth MDD will successfully respond to a treatment such as rTMS. Recent studies in MDD adults suggest that one's ability to successfully suppress unwanted thoughts and behaviours, also referred to as inhibitory control (IC), may be an indicator of treatment response, with impairment of this ability at baseline being associated with poor treatment outcomes. However, the potential of IC as a biomarker of treatment response in youth MDD has yet to be explored. Thus, our aims including 1) assessing the efficacy of rTMS for treating youth MDD and 2) assessing whether IC has any predictive value of rTMS treatment response in youth MDD. This project thus not only holds the potential to substantiate rTMS as a treatment for youth MDD, but to also uncover biomarkers of treatment response in this patient population, which ultimately may help prevent further time and costs lost on ineffective therapies by allowing us to make an informed decision as to whether a person is likely to respond to a specific type of treatment or not.