VIDEO: Cariprazine effective adjunctive therapy in MDD

In this video, Michael E. Thase, MD, MS, spoke with Healio about his poster presentation from the 2022 NEI Congress regarding clinical trial results on cariprazine for adjunctive treatment of major depressive disorder.

“Cariprazine has established efficacy in schizophrenia, in mania and most recently [in] bipolar depression,” Thase, director of the mood and anxiety disorders program and professor of psychiatry at Penn Medicine, said. “And that benefit profile made it relatively certain that it would be useful, probably in lower doses, as an adjunctive therapy for major depressive disorder.”

He explained that the poster he presented, a pooled analysis of the available data on this treatment from phase 2 and phase 3 studies, evaluated the “likely effective doses” for cariprazine as an adjunctive therapy for MDD.

“We demonstrated that for patients who had not had an adequate response to two or more antidepressant treatment trials in the current episode — and these would be with standard SSRIs or SNRIs — that 6 weeks of adjunctive treatment with cariprazine was effective,” he said. “The effectiveness was often evident within the first week or two of treatment, and sustained with reasonable.”

He added that the effectiveness of cariprazine was shown “within the first week or two of treatment,” and was sustained with little weight gain, sedation and reasonable tolerability, and low incidence of adverse events.

“It’s a good time to be treating depression,” Thase said. “There are more options than ever before, and perhaps even better options on the way.”

Editor's note: At 2:32, Thase said that researchers were studying potential effective doses of cariprazine at 2 mg and 3 mg per day. The referenced research assessed doses of 1.5 mg and 3 mg per day.