Saturday, November 21, 2009

Why antidepressants don't work? A new discovery

Do you know why antidepressants don't work?
For decades, antidepressants are developed around a belief that stress is the major cause of depression which leads to the unbalance of neurotransmitters which is the direct cause of depression symptoms.
Eva Redei made a report at the Neuroscience 2009 conference that she found there was no overlap with depression related genes and stress related genes. Out of more than 30,000 genes on micro array, 254 were stress related, 1275 depression related, while only 5 were found existed in both samples.
It means, if you have stresses, those antidepressant may work for you, but if you are depressed, those antidepressant may not work. She used micro array technology which can detect all the genes at one time.
In her second part of researches, she found that the depression started back in the development of neurons instead of the neurotransmitters because there was no significant differences in her animal model in the levels of genes that control neurotransmitter functions. That means, the depressant medications works as the band-aids on the final effect rather than the treatments of the cause.
This is actually a breakthrough for studying depression.
But do you know why there was almost a 50 fold increase in antidepressants that dispensed in these 10 years?

2 comments:

  1. anti depresants sucks, would rather eat chicken than anti depressants, because chicken r more likely to cure depress

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  2. Sometimes,it's better to combine different methods, taking antidepressants too long always leads to quite a lot of side effects. I recommend introspection, CBT and natural depression treatments according to your situation.

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