The Effect of the 5-HT4 Agonist, Prucalopride, on a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Faces Task in the Healthy Human Brain

• Published in: Frontiers in psychiatry 2022-04, Vol.13, p.859123
• Main Authors: de Cates, Angharad N., Martens, Marieke A. G., Wright, Lucy C., Gould van Praag, Cassandra D., Capitão, Liliana P., Gibson, Daisy, Cowen, Philip J., Harmer, Catherine J., Murphy, Susannah E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: antidepressant; cognition; emotional processing; functional neuroimaging (fMRI); Psychiatry; serotonin receptor 4
• ISSN: 1664-0640; 1664-0640
• DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.859123

Depression is a common and often recurrent illness with significant negative impact on a global scale. Current antidepressants are ineffective for up to one third of people with depression, many of whom experience persistent symptomatology. 5-HT 4 receptor agonists show promise in both animal models of depression and cognitive deficit. We therefore studied the effect of the 5-HT 4 partial agonist prucalopride (1 mg daily for 6 days) on the neural processing of emotional faces in 43 healthy participants using a randomised placebo-controlled design. Participants receiving prucalopride were more accurate at identifying the gender of emotional faces. In whole brain analyses, prucalopride was also associated with reduced activation in a network of regions corresponding to the default mode network. However, there was no evidence that prucalopride treatment produced a positive bias in the neural processing of emotional faces. Our study provides further support for a pro-cognitive effect of 5-HT 4 receptor agonism in humans. While our current behavioural and neural investigations do not suggest an antidepressant-like profile of prucalopride in humans, it will be important to study a wider dose range in future studies.