PhD student: Charles Ouazana Vedrines
Title: Filled prescription and response to antidepressant treatments
Supervisor(s): Pr Cédric Lemogne / Pr Nicolas Hoertel
Doctoral school: ED 393 Epidemiology and Biomedical Information Sciences, Université Paris Cité
Promotion: 2023
Funding: Assistant professor in public health, Hôtel Dieu, APHP.Centre – Université Paris Cité
Thesis abstract
Depression is a frequent and serious illness (20% lifetime risk and 1st cause of suicide). For moderate to severe depressive episodes, antidepressants are the 1st-line drug treatment. But only one in two patients actually benefits from the first antidepressant prescribed. In theory, these numbers could be improved through personalized prescribing aiming for precision medicine, but to date there are no predictive criteria for response to one antidepressant rather than another. We use the Système National des Données de Santé (SNDS, French national health data system), using antidepressant filled prescription sequences as a proxy of clinical acceptability.
Our objectives are :
- create the world’s largest cohort of patients receiving their first antidepressant medication (8 to 10 million patients).
- identify predictive factors (age, sex, comorbidities, etc.) for the clinical acceptability (efficacy – tolerance) of each antidepressant medication from a personalized medicine perspective.
3. discover molecules not known as antidepressants, but which could play a role in the treatment of depression, and in the future be prescribed as such