Research and Collaboration
Left to right: Lindner doctoral student Beau Sauley with Associate Economics Professor Jeffrey Mills, PhD, and lead researcher Jeffrey Strawn, MD, College of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience.
Certain Antidepressants More Effective in Treating Youth Anxiety Disorder
Lindner researchers partner with UC's College of Medicine to build a data model that proves the most effective antidepressant treatment
By Alison Sampson
For children and adolescents who require medication to treat anxiety, there are two primary classes of antidepressants that are prescribed: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and selective serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs).
Now, University of Cincinnati research, published online ahead of the April issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry shows for the first time that SSRIs may be the more effective option.
"For a long time there had been this sense that SSRIs work better than the SNRIs in treating anxious youth, but there wasn’t clear evidence to back this up, so we wanted to put that notion to the test,” says Jeffrey Strawn, MD, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the UC of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and lead author on the study.
"What we found is that with the SSRIs, compared to SNRIs, people get better faster and see greater improvement overall. There had been some suggestion of this in some individual studies, but this is the first to evaluate the magnitude and trajectory of treatment, or in other words, how much and how quickly people get better.”
For the meta-analysis, UC researchers compiled the data from nine randomized controlled trials. Strawn partnered with Jeffrey Welge, PhD, research associate professor of psychiatry, and econometricians Jeffrey Mills and Beau Sauley at the Lindner College of Business who created a model to examine two things: how quickly the patients got better and by how much.
The models showed that patients started to see improvements from medication around two weeks, with the more significant improvement occurring in the fourth week of treatment. Strawn says it was also important to look at medication dosage to find out whether the dose of the medication affected improvement.
"We saw that [dosage] didn’t necessarily affect how much the patients improve, but it did affect how quickly they get better,” says Strawn, indicating that a higher dosage helped this.
Jeffrey Mills, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the Lindner College of Business, and Sauley, a doctoral student, used statistical analysis common in economic modeling to apply it to the clinical data.
"We have very complementary skill sets, so interdisciplinary research of this nature is a great example of work that could not be accomplished by any one author,” says Mills. "Everyone’s contributions results in more robust research that none of us would be able to produce alone.”
Mills’ particular expertise is in Bayesian statistical inference and modeling. "As an econometrician, I have mostly applied these tools to analyzing economic data, so it is refreshing and exciting to get to apply my expertise to a different field like psychopharmacology,” he says.
Strawn says one significant aspect of this study lies in the fact that it may be immediately applicable to clinical practice.
"In research, many findings impact our work in the clinic years down the road, but this type of work potentially changes how we select medications to treat children and adolescents with anxiety disorders today,” he adds.
P&G Grants Support Big Data Research
The Lindner College of Business received a one-year Higher Education Grant from Procter & Gamble to support phase two of a big data initiative in the Department of Operations, Business Analytics and Information Systems (OBAIS).
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, there is a growing interest for big data solutions in the business world and the U.S. will need to increase the number of graduates with data science skills by 60% to meet this demand. As a solution, the OBAIS department launched the Big Data Initiative with support from an initial P&G grant in 2015, which has grown into a robust research collaboration amongst several faculty, including Roger Chiang, Michael Fry, Andrew Harrison, Michael Magazine, Binny Samuel, Zhe (Jay) Shan, Yichen Qin and Yan Yu.
Building upon the current OBAIS Big Data Initiative, the new 2018 Big Data Curriculum aims to develop the next generation of big data professionals—Lindner students who will become cutting-edge data experts and will go on to work at Fortune 500 companies.
Additionally, this new platform will provide faculty the necessary research infrastructure to conduct high-performance analysis on large-scale data sets.
Departmental Research Highlights
Jorge Pena Marín, PhD
Assistant Professor of Marketing
When it comes to negotiations, Marín found that if you're looking to close a sales deal, a round price versus a precise number is more likely to be accepted. His research “Round Off the Bargaining: The Effects of Offer Roundness on Willingness to Accept” is forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Lightning Round Research Presentation:
Round Off the Bargaining: The Effects of Offer Roundness on Willingness to Accept
Suzanne Masterson, PhD
Interim Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Professor of Management
Masterson has been at the forefront of researching work relationships and the impact of workplace design. Her latest joint work: “A Spatial Model of Work Relationships: The Relationship-Building and Relationship-Straining Effects of Workspace Design” is published in the Academy of Management Review.
Lightning Round Research Presentation:
A Spatial Model of Work Relationships: The Relationship-Building and Relationship-Straining Effects of Workspace Design
Mehmet Sağlam, PhD
Johnson Assistant Professor of Finance
Sağlam's research, "Liquidity Regimes and Optimal Dynamic Asset Allocation," examines the optimal dynamic asset allocation decision in different market states. It argues why it may be preferable to overweight government bonds in both recession and expansion periods by illustrating that corporate bonds may be too costly to trade out of in a crisis state. His work is currently under peer-review for publication in a top-tier finance journal.
Lightning Round Research Presentation:
Liquidity Regimes and Optimal Dynamic Asset Allocation
Rene Saran, PhD
Associate Professor of Economics
As a behavioral economist interested in mechanism design, Saran's research, “Eliciting and Aggregating Information by Sortition in Collective Choice,” proposes that a company can improve strategic planning and decision-making by tweaking the hierarchical organizational structure by adding random selection (sortition) of top-level decision-makers in the company in order to elicit dispersed information across departments. His research is forthcoming in the Economic Journal.
Lightning Round Research Presentation:
Using Sortition To Improve Decision-Making in Organizations
Changjiang "John" Wang
Associate Professor of Accounting
Wang's research, "Does Accounting Quality Change Following a Switch from U.S. GAAP to IFRS? Evidence from Germany,” reveals the need for establishing a single set of accounting standards for international use and is published in the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy. His work "Relative Benefits of IFRS Adoption Convergence on Financial Statement Comparability" is also forthcoming in Contemporary Accounting Research.
Lightning Round Research Presentation:
Accounting Convergence and the Potential Adoption of IFRS by the U.S.: Evidence from Germany
Jaime Windeler, PhD
Associate Professor of Operations, Business Analytics and Information Systems
Windeler’s research, “Shaping First Impressions in Virtual Teams,” explores first impressions between employees who do not share physical workspaces or have in-person interactions. She designed a social media application that captured and displayed employees' personal similarities and differences. Her experiment with the application demonstrated that teams exposed to member similarities achieved better performance than teams where member differences were highlighted. Her research suggests that diversity offers many benefits including creativity and innovation, but teams must first find common ground to create cohesion and foster a productive atmosphere. Her findings have implications for classrooms, organizational onboarding procedures and project launches.
Lightning Round Research Presentation:
Shaping First Impressions in Virtual Teams