Category: Depression

The brain is not the only organ healed by prompt depression treatment.

Effective treatment of depression can also benefit heart health, a new study finds.

Depression treatment reduces the risk of heart failure, heart attack and stroke, the research found.

Dr Heidi May, part of the team involved in the study, said:

“Our study shows that prompt, effective treatment of depression appears to improve the risk of poor heart health.”

The results come from examining the medical records of 7,550 patients in the Intermountain Healthcare database.

They found that if untreated, depression led to around a 30% higher chance of cardiovascular risk.

Those who were successfully treated for depression, though, had the same cardiovascular risk as those who were not depressed.

Dr May said:

“With the help of past research, we know depression affects long-term cardiovascular risks, but knowing that alleviating the symptoms of depression reduces a person’s risk of heart disease in the short term, too, can help care providers and patients commit more fully to treating the symptoms of depression.

The key conclusion of our study is: If depression isn’t treated, the risk of cardiovascular complications increases significantly.”

Dr May continued:

“There’s little publically-available data about this question.

But now with the help of Intermountain’s depression registry, we have the ability to start answering some of these difficult questions.

What we’ve done thus far is simply observe data that has previously been collected.

In order to dig deeper, we need do a full clinical trial to fully evaluate what we’ve observed.”

The study was presented at the 2016 American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions in Chicago.

Image credit: dierk schaefer

Do depressive genes mean you will develop mental health problems?

A family history of depression alone does not determine whether you will suffer from depression, a new study finds.

Instead the environment is a major factor.

The conclusions come from a study which bred rats to be depressed.

After receiving “rat psychotherapy”, though, the rats returned to normal and demonstrated non-depressed blood biomarkers.

Professor Eva Redei, who led the study, said:

“The environment can modify a genetic predisposition to depression.

If someone has a strong history of depression in her family and is afraid she or her future children will develop depression, our study is reassuring.

It suggests that even with a high predisposition for depression, psychotherapy or behavioral activation therapy can alleviate it.”

Rat psychotherapy involves putting the rats in large cages which the authors describe as like ‘Disneyland’ (but presumably in a good way!).

The large cages contained lots of toys and places for them to play and hide.

The rats were put in their playground for a month before they were tested for depression.

How to tell if a rat is depressed

Here’s how you check if a rat is depressed: you put it in a tank of water.

If the rat swims around looking for an exit then it is not depressed.

If the rat just floats — it is depressed and has given up hope.

The study is good news for people with a family history of depression, Professor Redei said:

“You don’t have people who are completely genetically predisposed to depression the way the rats were.

If you can modify depression in these rats, you most certainly should be able to do it in humans.”

The study was published in the journal Translational Psychiatry (Mehta-Raghavan et al., 2016).

DNA person image from Shutterstock

3,961 people from 29 different studies were included in the analysis.

Depression is more than a mental disorder, it affects the body’s ability to detoxify itself.

It should be seen as a systematic disease that affects the whole body, argues a new study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Accepting that depression affects the whole body could help explain why people experiencing depression are more likely to suffer from cancer, cardiovascular disease and to die younger.

All of these problems can be combated, however, by the usual treatments for depression: talk therapy and/or medication.

The conclusions come from examining the results of 29 previous studies.

These looked at how depression affected the bodies of 3,961 people in different ways.

The studies consistently found that depression was linked to oxidative stress in the body.

Oxidative stress refers to an imbalance in the body which hurts its ability to get rid of toxic substances.

The researchers found that after normal treatment, the body recovers relatively quickly.

After successful treatment, the bodies of people who were formerly depressed are virtual indistinguishable from healthy people in terms of oxidative stress.

The study was published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (Jiménez-Fernández et al., 2015).

Depression image from Shutterstock

In the US, women are twice as likely to have been diagnosed with depression at some point.

Women’s high rate of depression could be partly related to lower wages, a new study concludes.

In the US, women are twice as likely to have been diagnosed with major depression at some point.

However, the research found that for women who were paid the same as their colleagues, there was no difference in depression diagnoses between men and women.

For women who were paid less, though, their risk of suffering from major depression was 2.5 times higher.

Mr Jonathan Platt, the study’s first author, said:

“Our results show that some of the gender disparities in depression and anxiety may be due to the effects of structural gender inequality in the workforce and beyond.

The social processes that sort women into certain jobs, compensate them less than equivalent male counterparts, and create gender disparities in domestic labor have material and psychosocial consequences.”

One explanation for the effect of wages on depression could be that women internalise a message of inferiority, said Mr Platt:

“If women internalize these negative experiences as reflective of inferior merit, rather than the result of discrimination, they may be at increased risk for depression and anxiety disorders.”

The results come from a US survey of 22,581 adults aged 30-65.

Women were matched with men based on their education and years of experience.

Dr Katherine Keyes, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our findings suggest that policies must go beyond prohibiting overt gender discrimination like sexual harassment.

Further, while it is commonly believed that gender differences in depression and anxiety are biologically rooted, these results suggest that such differences are much more socially constructed that previously thought, indicating that gender disparities in psychiatric disorders are malleable and arise from unfair treatment.”

Dr Keyes continued:

“Structural forms of discrimination may explain a substantial proportion of gender disparities in mood and anxiety disorders in the U.S. adult population.

Greater attention to the fundamental mechanisms that perpetuate wage disparities is needed, not only because it is unjust, but so that we may understand and be able to intervene to reduce subsequent health risks and disparities.”

The study was published in the journal Social Science & Medicine (Platt et al., 2016).

Depressed woman image from Shutterstock

The US federal poverty level for a family of four is $24,250 a year.

Key brain structures show weaker connections in poor children, a new study finds.

Brain scans of 105 children aged between 7 and 12 showed weaker connections in the hippocampus and amygdala, among other differences.

The hippocampus is a key brain area related to memory, learning and the regulation of stress.

The amygdala is related to processing emotions and also stress.

Poorer children had the weakest brain connections in the hippocampus and amygdala.

Poverty was also related to higher levels of depression.

Professor Deanna M. Barch, the study’s first author, said:

“Our past research has shown that the brain’s anatomy can look different in poor children, with the size of the hippocampus and amygdala frequently altered in kids raised in poverty.

In this study, we found that the way those structures connect with the rest of the brain changes in ways we would consider to be less helpful in regulating emotion and stress.”

Professor Joan L. Luby, a co-author, said:

“Poverty is one of the most powerful predictors of poor developmental outcomes for children.

Previously, we’ve seen that there may be ways to overcome some brain changes linked to poverty, but we didn’t see anything that reversed the negative changes in connectivity present in poor kids.”

The US federal poverty level for a family of four is $24,250 a year.

Children raised in poverty are more likely to suffer from psychiatric illnesses and to behave antisocially.

They also have poorer educational outcomes and worse cognitive scores.

Professor Barch said:

“Many things can be done to foster brain development and positive emotional development.

Poverty doesn’t put a child on a predetermined trajectory, but it behooves us to remember that adverse experiences early in life are influencing the development and function of the brain.

And if we hope to intervene, we need to do it early so that we can help shift children onto the best possible developmental trajectories.”

The study was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (Barch et al., 2016).

Brain image from Shutterstock

A very pleasurable way to reduce depression risk.

Wine drunk in moderation can reduce the risk of developing depression, research finds.

Moderate alcohol intake can have a similar protective effect on depression as that found for heart disease.

Professor Miguel A. Martínez-González, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Lower amounts of alcohol intake might exert protection in a similar way to what has been observed for coronary heart disease.

In fact, it is believed that depression and coronary heart disease share some common disease mechanisms.”

To reach these conclusions researchers followed over 5,500 people for between 5 and 7 years.

At the start of the study none had suffered from depression and did not have alcohol-related problems.

People naturally drank varying amounts and different drinks, but the most commonly consumed beverage was wine.

The results showed that the lowest rates of depression were seen in those who were light to moderate drinkers.

Light to moderate drinkers had between two and seven small glasses of wine per week.

The researchers adjusted for other factors that could have been important, such as social factors, diet and smoking.

Scientists think some of the protective effects are provided by resveratrol and other phenolic compounds in the wine.

The study was published in the journal BMC Medicine (Geo et al., 2013).