Key result
Skin conductance features measured during mental arithmetic stress and relaxation tasks distinguished patients with major depressive disorder from healthy controls with 70.5% accuracy using a support vector machine algorithm.
Why the study?
Depressive symptoms are linked to autonomic nervous system abnormalities, and the authors investigated the feasibility of developing an objective measure of depressive symptoms based on physiological responses during mental stress.
Does skin conductance analysis during mental stress and relaxation distinguish patients with Major Depressive Disorder from healthy controls?
Case-Control (n=61)
Does skin conductance analysis during mental stress and relaxation distinguish patients with Major Depressive Disorder from healthy controls?
Effect estimate: 70.49% accuracy
Skin conductance features measured during mental stress and relaxation can distinguish patients with major depressive disorder from healthy controls with 70% accuracy.
May support skin conductance as an MDD biomarker; leaves open prospective validation before clinical use.
Depressive symptoms are related to abnormalities in the autonomic nervous system (ANS), and physiological signals that can be used to measure and evaluate such abnormalities have previously been used as indicators for diagnosing mental disorder, such as major depressive disorder (MDD). In this study, we investigate the feasibility of developing an objective measure of depressive symptoms that is based on examining physiological abnormalities in individuals when they are experiencing mental stress. To perform this, we recruited 30 patients with MDD and 31 healthy controls. Then, skin conductance (SC) was measured during five 5-min experimental phases, comprising baseline, mental stress, recovery from the stress, relaxation, and recovery from the relaxation, respectively. For each phase, the mean amplitude of the skin conductance level (MSCL), standard deviations of the SCL (SDSCL), slope of the SCL (SSCL), mean amplitude of the non-specific skin conductance responses (MSCR), number of non-specific skin conductance responses (NSCR), and power spectral density (PSD) were evaluated from the SC signals, producing 30 parameters overall (six features for each phase). These features were used as input data for a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm designed to distinguish MDD patients from healthy controls based on their physiological responses. Statistical tests showed that the main effect of task was significant in all SC features, and the main effect of group was significant in MSCL, SDSCL, SSCL, and PSD. In addition, the proposed algorithm achieved 70% accuracy, 70% sensitivity, 71% specificity, 70% positive predictive value, 71% negative predictive value in classifying MDD patients and healthy controls. These results demonstrated that it is possible to extract meaningful features that reflect changes in ANS responses to various stimuli. Using these features, detection of MDD was feasible, suggesting that SC analysis has great potential for future diagnostics and prediction of depression based on objective interpretation of depressive states.
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Kim et al. (2019) conducted a case-control in Major Depressive Disorder (n=61). Mental arithmetic stress and relaxation tasks vs. Healthy controls was evaluated on Classification accuracy of MDD versus healthy controls using a support vector machine (SVM) based on skin conductance features (70.49% accuracy). Skin conductance features measured during mental arithmetic stress and relaxation tasks distinguished patients with major depressive disorder from healthy controls with 70.5% accuracy using a support vector machine algorithm.
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