Colleges
Riccardo De Giorgi
MD, MRCPsych
Wellcome Trust Doctoral Training Fellow
I am a Wellcome Trust Doctoral Training Fellow (DPhil in Biomedical and Clinical Sciences) at the University of Oxford, Department of Psychiatry, and a honorary Clinical Fellow (MRCPsych) at the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.
My focus is on academic psychiatry and I am interested in the evidence-based treatment of mental illness, especially within the themes of psychopharmacology and mood disorders. I am fascinated by the problem of "treatment-resistance", i.e. when patients do not appear to respond to several lines of therapy. The physiopathological heterogeneity underlying treatment-resistance highlights the need for mechanistically dissimilar approaches to resolve this problem; in other words, I propose to apply the "precision medicine" paradigm to treatment-resistance.
For example, there is increasing evidence that inflammation plays a role in the pathophysiology of depression, especially in patients who are treatment-resistant. Indeed, part of the heterogeneous clinical responses to treatment in depression could be accounted for by a subgroup of patients with baseline inflammation. Therefore, anti-inflammatory treatments may particularly benefit those patients who respond poorly to conventional antidepressants and who might be identifiable a priori through measurement of inflammatory markers.
Currently, I am working on an experimental medicine study on the use of anti-inflammatory drugs in patients with treatment-resistant depression and elevated inflammation. I aim to use early markers of anti-depressant response, such as changes in emotional processing and reward measured by behavioural tasks and brain imaging, to validate the potential of these drugs in further clinical trials.
Recent publications
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Journal article
De Cates A. and De Giorgi R., (2020), BJPsych Advances, 26, 321 - 326
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Journal article
De Cates A. and De Giorgi R., (2020), BJPsych Advances, 26, 321 - 326
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Journal article
De Giorgi R., (2019), BJPsych Advances, 25, 396 - 398
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The tail wagging the dog - the diagnostic accuracy of first rank symptoms
Journal article
Townsend L. and DE GIORGI R., (2019), BJPsych Advances
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Prevalence of non-affective psychoses in individuals with autism spectrum disorders: a systematic review
Journal article
DE GIORGI R. et al, (2019), Journal of Clinical Medicine