Riccardo De Giorgi

I am a Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford, Department of Psychiatry, and ST4-6 at Health Education England-Thames Valley, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. I am the academic representative for the European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees programme in Oxford and the Oxford Clinical-Academic Journal Club. I am a tutor in psychiatry and regularly teach medical students and trainees about the topics of research methodology and critical appraisal, psychopharmacology, and mood disorders.

I am interested in the neuropsychopharmacology and evidence-based treatment of mental illness, especially 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. There is increasing evidence that immunological and metabolic factors play a role in the pathophysiology of depression, especially in patients who are treatment-resistant. Repurposing commonly used medical treatments (e.g., anti-inflammatory medications) may therefore  benefit those patients who respond poorly to conventional antidepressants and who might be identifiable a priori through measurement of inflammatory and metabolic markers.

Currently, I am working on experimental medicine studies for the repurposing of drugs with immuno-metabolic activity (e.g., statins, GLP1-RAs) in mood disorders. I look at early markers of antidepressant response, such as changes in emotional processing, reward, and immuno-metabolic peripheral markers to validate the use of these drugs in further clinical trials.