Category: Depression

The cause of depression is related to how we deal with disappointment and what happy memories we can recall.

A part of the brain linked to disappointment at not receiving a reward has been linked to depression by a new study.

The area, called the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, normally becomes active when people fail to get a reward they were expecting.

In people who were depressed, this area was more strongly linked to other areas involved in our sense of self and personal loss.

In other words: depressed people are more likely to suffer self-esteem issues and a feeling of loss if they don’t get the rewards they are expecting.

Professor Edmund Rolls, a study co-author, said:

“The new findings on how depression is related to different functional connectivities of the orbitofrontal cortex have implications for treatments in the light of a recent non-reward attractor theory of depression.”

Cause of depression

The research compared brain scans of depressed and non-depressed people.

The study was interested in how certain critical areas of the brain communicate with each other.

Typically, depressed people had stronger connections between ‘disappointment’ circuits in the brain and those related to the sense of self.

In addition, depressed people had weaker connections between areas of the brain that register when we do get rewards (the medial orbitofrontal cortex) and those important for memory.

Together these might help explain why depressed people tend to:

• Feel worse about not getting a reward they expect,
• and fail to recall happy memories.

Professor Jianfeng Feng, one of the study’s authors, said:

“More than one in ten people in their life time suffer from depression, a disease which is so common in modern society and we can even find the remains of Prozac (a depression drug) in the tap water in London.

Our finding, with the combination of big data we collected around the world and our novel methods, enables us to locate the roots of depression which should open up new avenues for better therapeutic treatments in the near future for this horrible disease.”

The study was published in the journal Brain (Cheng et al., 2016).

Finding could be linked to depressive symptoms such as loss of appetite and sleep problems.

Major depression is linked to inflammation of the brain.

People experiencing clinical depression have 30% higher brain inflammation, the recent research found.

The more depressed people were, the greater the levels of inflammation.

Professor Jeffrey Meyer, who led the research, said:

“This finding provides the most compelling evidence to date of brain inflammation during a major depressive episode.

Previous studies have looked at markers of inflammation in blood, but this is the first definitive evidence found in the brain.”

The brain typically protects itself through inflammation, but too much can be harmful.

The inflammation may generate some of the symptoms of depression, including:

• loss of appetite,
• low mood,
• and sleep problems.

For the study, the researchers scanned the brains of 20 people with depression and compared them to 20 healthy controls.

Inflammation was greatest among those who were depressed.

Professor Meyer said:

“This discovery has important implications for developing new treatments for a significant group of people who suffer from depression.

It provides a potential new target to either reverse the brain inflammation or shift to a more positive repair role, with the idea that it would alleviate symptoms.”

One potential way of helping to treat depression is by using anti-inflammatories.

Professor Meyer warned, however, that brain inflammation isn’t the whole story:

“Depression is a complex illness and we know that it takes more than one biological change to tip someone into an episode.

But we now believe that inflammation in the brain is one of these changes and that’s an important step forward.”

An expanding group of studies has linked depression to brain inflammation:

• Major Depression: This New Type Could Account For One-Third of Sufferers
• Depression Breakthrough: Blood Test Predicts Correct Treatment

The study was published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry (Setiawan et al., 2014).

Shiny brain image from Shutterstock

The first antidepressants prescribed do not work for around half of all patients who are depressed.

Unfortunately, for around half of depressed patients, the first antidepressants prescribed do not work.

On top of that, around one-third of patients do not respond to any types of drugs (although psychological therapies may be useful).

At the moment, the only way to know is to try them and see what happens.

This means that many depressed people have to wait around three months to see if the drugs will work.

Then, if they don’t, it is another wait while a different form of medication is tried.

Now, though, scientists have found that some people with particular markers in their blood will not respond to antidepressants.

Professor Carmine Pariante, who led the study, said:

“This is the first time a blood test has been used to precisely predict, in two independent clinical groups of depressed patients, the response to a range of commonly prescribed antidepressants.

These results also confirm and extend the mounting evidence that high levels of inflammation induce a more severe form of depression, which is less likely to respond to common antidepressants.

This study moves us a step closer to providing personalised antidepressant treatment at the earliest signs of depression.”

The blood test focuses on two different types of biomarkers that measure blood inflammation.

Patients whose blood biomarkers were above a certain level had a 100% chance of not responding to the most common type of antidepressant medication.

Those below that level mostly responded positively.

Professor Pariante said:

“This study provides a clinically-suitable approach for personalising antidepressant therapy — patients who have blood inflammation above a certain threshold could be directed toward earlier access to more assertive antidepressant strategies, including the addition of other antidepressants or anti-inflammatory drugs.

It is really crucial now to carry out a clinical study comparing the current clinical practice in antidepressant prescription, based on trial-and-error, with our novel approach of ‘personalised psychiatry’, where the antidepressant treatment plan is guided by the blood test.”

The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology (Catteneo et al., 2016).

Image credit: kygp

Psilocybin, a hallucinogen in magic mushrooms, was found to be well-tolerated and safe to use.

Psilocybin — a hallucinogen from ‘magic’ mushrooms — can help reduce the symptoms of severe depression, a new study finds.

Psilocybin is also currently being tested for alcoholism, smoking cessation, and in people with advanced cancer.

The small study gave psilocybin to 12 people with treatment-resistant depression.

The hallucinogen was found to be well-tolerated and safe to use.

Along with supportive therapy, the psilocybin helped half the participants to feel better up to three months later.

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, the study’s first author, said:

“This is the first time that psilocybin has been investigated as a potential treatment for major depression.

Treatment-resistant depression is common, disabling and extremely difficult to treat.

New treatments are urgently needed, and our study shows that psilocybin is a promising area of future research.

The results are encouraging and we now need larger trials to understand whether the effects we saw in this study translate into long-term benefits, and to study how psilocybin compares to other current treatments.”

Participants in the study had been ill with depression for an average of 17 years.

All had tried antidepressants  twice and most had already had psychotherapy.

They were given a therapeutic dose of 25mg while being monitored by two psychiatrists.

Professor David Nutt, one of the study’s co-authors, said:

“Previous animal and human brain imaging studies have suggested that psilocybin may have effects similar to other antidepressant treatments.

Psilocybin targets the serotonin receptors in the brain, just as most antidepressants do, but it has a very different chemical structure to currently available antidepressants and acts faster than traditional antidepressants.”

Professor Philip Cowen, writing in a linked commentary, said:

“The key observation that might eventually justify the use of a drug like psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression is demonstration of sustained benefit in patients who previously have experienced years of symptoms despite conventional treatments, which makes longer-term outcomes particularly important.

The data at 3 month follow-up (a comparatively short time in patients with extensive illness duration) are promising but not completely compelling, with about half the group showing significant depressive symptoms.

Further follow-ups using detailed qualitative interviews with patients and family could be very helpful in enriching the assessment.”

The study was published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry (Mithoefer et al., 2016).

Image credit: Valeria P.

The activity increases liveliness and reduces stress, depression and aggression.

Staring at some trees — even those in the city — can reliably reduce stress.

Even a small amount of exposure to trees is enough to boost mood.

And, the more dense the trees, the better, the study is the first to discover.

For the research, people were given mildly stressful tasks, such as preparing a speech and doing maths in front of a judges while being recorded.

Afterwards they were shown cityscapes in 360-degree videos.

The experimental trick was that the videos were manipulated to contain various amounts of trees.

They ranged from none to around 70% coverage.

The results showed that the more trees people saw in the cityscape, the quicker they recovered from their stressful talk or impromptu math torture.

Trees, it seems, are a little like medicine, the more you take, the bigger the effect (medical types call this a dose-response effect).

On the other hand, the side-effects of trees are restricted to feeling inadequate for not knowing their names and slipping on wet leaves.

It reminds me of shinrin-yoku or ‘forest bathing’, which I write about in 10 Remarkable Ways Nature Can Heal Your Mind:

“The Japanese are big fans of walking in the forest to promote their mental health.

The practice is called shinrin-yoku, which literally means ‘forest bathing’.

One study conducted by Japanese researchers has found that the practice is particularly useful for those suffering acute stress.

Their study of 498 people found that shinrin-yoku reduced hostility and depression as well as increasing people’s liveliness compared to comparable control groups.”

If you can’t find any trees near you, then the ocean will do to reduce your stress, according to this study I reported recently.

Should trees and water be beyond your reach, then try changing your desktop background to a forest.

When it all gets to much, minimise all your windows and stare at it longingly until a sense of deep and lasting peace returns…

…or until someone notices you’re not doing any work.

The study was published in the journal Environment and Behaviour (Jiang et al., 2016).

This is even better than having a view of a natural green space out of the window.

People who live with a water view have better mental health, new research finds.

It is the first research to find a link between ‘blue space’ (as opposed to ‘green space’) and mental well-being.

If you ever wondered why properties with a water view command such a premium, this could be part of the answer.

Dr Amber L. Pearson, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Increased views of blue space is significantly associated with lower levels of psychological distress.

However, we did not find that with green space.”

Other research, though, has found a link between green space and mental well-being:

Urban Living: Green Spaces Improve Your Mental Health

And even glancing at a simple grassy rooftop has some cognitive benefits:

The Surprising Mental Benefit To Glancing At a Grassy Rooftop for 40 Seconds

The research involved residential locations in Wellington, New Zealand.

The city is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean to the south and the Tasman Sea to the north.

The researchers took into account people’s sex, age, wealth and other factors, but still found a link between seeing water and better mental health.

The same effect was not seen for green spaces, but this might be a shortcoming of the research.

Dr Pearson said:

“It could be because the blue space was all natural, while the green space included human-made areas, such as sports fields and playgrounds, as well as natural areas such as native forests.

Perhaps if we only looked at native forests we might find something different.”

The study was published in the journal Health & Place (Nutsford et al., 2016).