Ground-breaking depression taste test to be trialled here

The Mood Assessment Taste Test (MATT) aims to ensure patients are confident their antidepressant treatment is right for them.

It will then hopefully encourage them to continue treatment, overcoming any side-effects while on the road to getting better.

‘Currently, people are treated for depression in a bit of an ad hoc way. Doctors are unaware of which one will work and which one won’t work, so patients have to live with the side-effects and problems of the treatment before knowing if it will work,’ said Dr David Adams, CEO of Ranvier Health, who designed the MATT.

Serotonin and noradrenaline are the same chemicals used in the taste buds as are used to control mood in the brain.

Most antidepressants work by increasing serotonin and noradrenaline in the brain which stabilises mood. But that can take four weeks.

The lab group working with Professor David Nutt, Chair of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, discovered 12 years ago in Bristol that within hours of taking antidepressants, taste changes.

‘Depending on how much of a difference in ability to taste you have, is an indicator of whether someone is actually biologically depressed or just sad,’ Dr Adams said.

‘This simple, same-day test is a way of seeing whether there is a correlation between taste and improvement with treatment and hopefully will help doctors treat patients in a pain-free way.

‘It’s the first of its kind, nothing like this has been attempted before. Years of work have gone into this and to actually be here in Guernsey now is excellent.’

The plan is to recruit 240 people in the next year who will be referred to the trial by doctors and pharmacists.

Professor Nutt said: ‘If it works, it’ll radically change the way we prescribe antidepressants.

‘For the first time we will be able to know which people will benefit from the traditional, common antidepressants [SSIs] and which ones won’t.

‘The ones that won’t benefit will no longer have to suffer six weeks of medicine that gives them side-effects and doesn’t help them – they could very quickly be transferred to an alternative.’

In 2006, Professor Nutt and colleagues wrote a paper about how they found other ways to measure serotonin than mood, finding taste buds showed an immediate effect.

A few years later Ranvier Health turned the research into a product.

‘To test that the trial works, everyone that comes in will have a prescribed treatment which contains serotonin.

‘We will then monitor how their taste changes two hours after taking the medicine and then see what happens in the long term.

‘Our prediction is that people who have a big change in taste will do best [on the medication] – the one’s who don’t get a change in taste won’t,’ Professor Nutt explained.

n For more information on the trial visit www.ranvierhealth.com.