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Background: As yet there is no firm evidence about the types of intervention that can reduce emergency room revisits. However, the literature on emergency room revisits suggests patient difficulties with managing their health problems and treatments after discharge may play a role. Objectives: We carried out a randomized trial of an emergency department-based nursing intervention, but results showed no reduction in revisits (primary outcome). This paper describes the secondary outcomes of the trial: patient perceptions of continuity of care, illness perceptions, self-care capacities, psychological symptoms and medication adherence 30 days after emergency room discharge. Design: Randomized, controlled trial. Settings: The trial was conducted in the emergency department of a tertiary cardiac hospital in Montreal, Canada between November 2007 and March 2010. Participants: The study involved 203 patients, including 108 in the experimental group and 95 in the control group. Methods: The intervention included one nurse patient encounter before discharge and two phone calls in the 10 days after discharge. Participants provided data 30 days post-discharge on secondary outcomes potentially related to emergency department revisits. Results: Although, as previously reported, the intervention had no impact on the primary outcome of emergency department revisits, the present study demonstrated a significant positive effect on patients’ perceived continuity of care (p = .033), self-care capacities (p = .037), anxiety (p = .007) and depressive symptoms (p = .043), and the illness perceptions treatment control subscale (p = .037). No differences were found for other illness perception subscales or medication adherence (all p’s > .05). Conclusion: Although the intervention did not influence emergency department revisits it did improve secondary outcomes, suggesting pathways for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a promising predictor of treatment response in major depressive disorder (MDD).Methods: A search for papers published in English was conducted using PubMed with the following words: depression, treatment, resting-state, connectivity, and fMRI. Findings from 21 studies of relations between resting-state fMRI and treatment response in MDD are presented, and common findings and themes are discussed.Results: The use of resting-state fMRI in research on MDD treatment response has yielded a number of consistent findings that provide a basis for understanding the potential mechanisms of action of antidepressant treatment response. These included (1) associations between response to antidepressant medications and increased functional connectivity between frontal and limbic brain regions, possibly resulting in greater inhibitory control over neural circuits that process emotions; (2) connectivity of visual recognition circuits in studies that compared treatment resistant and treatment sensitive patients; (3) response to TMS was consistently predicted by subcallosal cortex connectivity; and (4) hyperconnectivity of the default mode network and hypoconnectivity of the cognitive control network differentiated treatment-resistant from treatment-sensitive MDD patients.Limitations: There was also considerable variability between studies with respect to study designs and analytic strategies that made direct comparisons across all studies difficult.Conclusions: Continued standardization of study designs and analytic strategies as well as aggregation of larger datasets will allow the field to better elucidate the potential mechanisms of action of treatment response in patients with MDD to ultimately generate algorithms to predict which patients will respond to which antidepressant treatments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]