The Role of Negr1 In Modulating Neuroplasticity in Major Depression (RONIN)

Patients belonging to Group 1 (Major Depression) and 2 (Bipolar Disorder) will be tested with psychometric and functional scales at baseline (T0) and after 4 weeks of pharmacological therapy (T1), to evaluate clinical and functional response to treatment. MDD patients will be screened for the lifetime and recent occurrence of clinically meaningful suicidal ideation and behavior prior to recruitment (-T1). Moreover, in the MDD group, the emergence of clinically meaningful suicidal ideation and behavior will be evaluated at the baseline (T0) and after 4 weeks (T1) by means of the C-SSRS, accordingly to the routine clinical practice. Furtherly, to accomplish the pursues of this research, the two groups will undergo neuroimaging evaluation and a blood collection at the two timepoints for measuring the expression of ncRNA before and after treatment. Meanwhile, a lumbar puncture (LP) for CSF collection will be carried out at the baseline, measuring central levels of Negr-1 and other biomarkers of neurotropism potentially related to the aforementioned role of Negr1 in MDD. Group 3 will be comprehensive of 10 subjects without current or previous diagnosis of psychiatric disorders (healthy controls), who will be evaluated at baseline with psychometric and functional scales, neuroimaging and blood samples collection for ncRNA. Data obtained by the multimodal assessment of HCs at the baseline will be employed as normalization features in the statistical analysis of patients' data.