Clinical trialNCT00129467CompletedInterventional

Methylphenidate for Depressed Cancer Patients Receiving Palliative Care

SponsorUS Department of Veterans AffairsEnrollment47CancerDepressionMental DisorderPalliative Care

View the registry record on ClinicalTrials.gov

Summary

The lay summary the sponsor registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether methylphenidate is an effective treatment for depression and to document the safety and tolerability of methylphenidate in combination with an Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) in SSRI treated, terminally ill, hospice and palliative care cancer patients. The investigators hypothesize that depressed hospice and palliative care patients will be more likely to have a 50% reduction in scores on a clinical measure of depression after treatment with Methylphenidate plus an SSRI compared to those patients who are taking a placebo plus an SSRI.

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Investigators

The overall officials registered on this study. Names that resolve to a findmyKOL profile link to it; the rest are shown as registered.

Linda K. Ganzini, MD MPH
VA Portland Health Care System, Portland, OR
Principal Investigator
clinicaltrials.gov ↗

A profile link is shown only when the registered name resolves to a person record with a confident, namesake-checked match; ambiguous names stay unlinked.

Sites

1 registered facility, with the per-site recruitment status where the registry publishes one. ClinicalTrials.gov does not publish per-site enrollment counts.

United States

Va Portland Health Care System, Portland, Or
Portland, Oregon, United States

Site investigator names are published by ClinicalTrials.gov only while a study recruits, so completed studies list sites without them.

Drugs studied

The drug and biological interventions registered on this study, normalized to their RxNorm ingredient where possible.

Methylphenidate →PlaceboSelective Serotonin Uptake Inhibitor

Linked drugs open the directory filtered to KOLs working with them.clinicaltrials.gov ↗

Registration & key dates

Registry attributes as recorded on the ClinicalTrials.gov study record.

Start: 28 Feb 2005
Primary completion: 30 Sept 2009
Completion: 31 Dec 2010
Last update posted: 24 Apr 2015
Registered enrollment: 47
Registry id: NCT00129467

clinicaltrials.gov ↗

Source: ClinicalTrials.gov, via the CTTI AACT database, data as of 24 Aug 2026. Registry facts are shown as registered by the study sponsor; findmyKOL does not interpret them.