If you’ve been following me for a while now, you might know that anxiety disorder is an issue very close to my heart as I suffer from it. I’ve decided to use my platform to raise awareness on the matter, but also to help people who might not be very familiar with it understand the issue
What is the interaction between Cannabis and depression? How does Cannabis interact with common Anti-Depressant medications and what you should know about this?
Is there a role for melatonin in the treatment of anxiety? This video discusses the role of melatonin in the body and what we know about the impact of melatonin on sleep, anxiety, and pain. Melatonin is a hormone produced by the pineal gland in the brain in response to the presence or absence of daylight. Melatonin plays a significant role in the quality of sleep we experience and we do know that as we age the quantity of melatonin produced tends to decline.
Multiple prior studies have found higher levels of inflammation in older individuals with depression. Now, a new Penn Medicine study has found that clinically depressed older individuals, on average, don’t have elevated levels of inflammation if they don’t already have other inflammatory conditions such as arthritis.
The new study, published recently in Nature Translational Psychiatry, suggests that depression occurs independently of inflammation for many older adults. Furthermore, depression-inflammation links are due to the greater incidence of inflammatory conditions, which in general are common in older people.
“It is still true that inflammatory illnesses can contribute to depression, but our findings suggest that there is a subset of individuals with late-life depression who do not have elevated levels of inflammation,” said study senior author Yvette Sheline, MD, McLure Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Research in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
National surveys in the United States suggest that, although depression is diagnosed more often among younger adults, about five percent of people who are at least 50 years old have had a major depressive episode in the past year. Researchers suspect that many of these cases of late-life depression are caused by inflammation—in part because studies have found higher levels of inflammatory immune proteins in the blood of older people with depression, compared to non-depressed people of the same age.
Prior research also has shown that levels of inflammation markers generally tend to rise with increased age, as chronic illnesses set in and the body’s immune-regulating systems weaken. Based on such findings, doctors have tested anti-inflammatory drugs in patients with depression, and have found that they can improve outcomes when added to standard anti-depressant therapy.
The new study reveals, however, that the link between depression and inflammation is not as clear-cut as the prior literature suggests. Sheline and colleagues used online and in-person screening of over 1,100 depressed individuals to recruit a group of 63 individuals, age 50 to 80, who met criteria for major depressive disorder but did not have other inflammatory conditions. Comparing this group to 29 healthy individuals of the same age, even with highly sensitive measurements, the researchers found no significant differences in bloodstream levels of 29 different inflammation-linked immune proteins.
The researchers then randomized 60 of the depressed patients to receive either a standard antidepressant drug, or the antidepressant plus an anti-inflammatory drug, or placebo, for eight weeks. They found that while the two antidepressant-treated groups showed significant improvement in their depression ratings relative to placebo, there was no significant difference in outcome between the antidepressant and the antidepressant-plus-anti-inflammatory group. Moreover, in all three groups, the subjects’ blood levels of inflammatory markers were low before treatment and did not drop significantly as a result of treatment. The researchers even tested the cerebrospinal fluid of the subjects for levels of the inflammatory protein IL-1β, and again found low levels both before and after treatment.
The study therefore suggests that, in many older adults, depression occurs independently of inflammation, and probably won’t be alleviated by anti-inflammatory treatments unless inflammation is present in addition to depression.
The researchers note, however, that because their study excluded late-life depression patients who have inflammatory disorders, it leaves open the possibility that inflammation from such disorders can contribute to depression.
“Our study supports the view that depression consists of different sub-categories, some with inflammation and some without,” said Sheline, who is also director of Penn’s Center for Neuromodulation in Depression and Stress. “People who have depression should consult with their doctor to see if they have other illnesses that could cause inflammation, since there is evidence that increased inflammation can cause depressive symptoms.”
The artwork represents two mice and two people looking at each other. Pain sensitivity was found to be higher in dyads when the mice/people knew each other, or when they were strangers but stress was reduced. CREDIT Loren Martin and Mona Lisa Chanda
How is it that people can sometimes show such empathy when other times our ability to feel compassion seems to be in such short supply? A study published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on January 15 shows that stress is a major factor.
A drug that blocks stress hormones increases the ability of college students and mice to “feel” the pain of a stranger, the study shows. That phenomenon, known as “emotional contagion of pain,” is one form of empathy. In even better news, a shared round of the video game Rock Band worked just as well as the drugs among those undergrads.
“We found what in some sense might be thought of as the ‘secret’ to empathy; that is, what prevents it from occurring more often between strangers,” says Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University in Montreal. “The secret is–quite simply–stress, and in particular the social stress of being in close proximity with a stranger.”
Earlier studies had shown that mice and humans both have empathy for another’s pain, especially when the individual in pain is someone they know. It was also clear from those studies that stress levels rise in both mice and people when in the presence of a stranger.
To test for a direct connection between stress and empathy, Mogil and his colleagues treated male mice with a stress hormone-blocker called metyrapone and watched their response to the pain of other mice.
They found that the drug allowed greater empathy as mice began reacting to strangers in a manner normally reserved for familiar cagemates. In other tests, the researchers found that when they put mice under stress, the mice showed less empathy when their peers were in pain. In other words, biochemical changes related to stress were preventing emotional contagion in the animals.
The researchers went on to test for signs of empathy in undergraduate students by pairing them with either a friend or a stranger and having them rate the pain associated with holding a hand in ice water. Again, undergrads treated with metyrapone showed a greater sense of empathy toward strangers. After taking the drug, participants not only reported a greater experience of pain, but they also showed more pained facial expressions and more often touched their own hands when witnessing another’s pain.
This doesn’t mean that Mogil would recommend that anyone with the goal of becoming more empathetic take a pill. There is an easier way: A simple psychosocial interaction–a game of Rock Band–worked just as well as the drugs in boosting empathy toward another person, the researchers report.
The findings are the first to suggest an important role for the stress axis in the brain and endocrine system in modulating our response to other people, the researchers say. They also suggest that mice and humans are surprisingly similar when it comes to social behaviors.
“It is quite intriguing indeed that this phenomenon appears to be identical in mice and humans,” Mogil says. “First, it supports the notion that mice are capable of more complex social phenomena than is commonly believed. Second, it suggests that human social phenomena might actually be simpler than commonly believed, at least in terms of their organizing principles. This is an emerging theme of much research currently ongoing in my lab; when it comes to social behavior, ‘mice are people too.'”
A game of Rock Band, anyone?