Posts archived in Psychology A2


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Depression-serotonin link may be wrong

September 14, 2010 by .

The general view is that low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin are linked with depression. However a number of studies have found, not surprisingly, that the relationship is more complex than that according to a recent review by Geddes in the New Scientist (July 2010). Increased levels of serotonin in some regions of the brain may lead to elevated mood but in other regions there may be negative effects. This may explain why antidepressants that increase serotonin levels (e.g. SSRIs) aren’t always effective. For example, in the short-term people taking SSRIs report feelings of anxiety which may be due to the fact that increasing serotonin levels has negative effects on some serotonin neurons. Boosting serotonin is also associated with increased impulsivity which might explain why SSRIs are linked to suicide.

You can read more here

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Costs and Benefits of Drug therapy

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Insomnia and anxiety disorders are very different problems, each making normal, everyday life difficult, and drug therapy can usually help with both of these conditions.

However, a word of caution is now being given about such therapy as a meta-analysis of over 12 years’ Canadian data suggests that the costs of such treatment might outweigh the benefits. The issue is that these treatments seem to be associated with a significant increase in mortality rate from 10.5% to 15.7%.  This is still a low risk of dying, but it does represent an increase if using the medication of about 36% compared to not using medication when other variables are factored in.  The data came from more than 14.000 adults between the ages of 18 and 102, and extraneous or confounding variables such as smoking, alcohol use, general health and physical activity were controlled for.

Why is there such an increased risk of dying when using these drug therapies? It is known that sleeping pills and anti- Read the rest of this entry »

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Mmmmm . . . chocolate and mood

July 7, 2010 by .

So many people love eating chocolate, and believe it is a mood-influencing food giving pleasure plus a lift in mood – a happyfood!

Now research suggests that many depressed people really do eat more chocolate. These findings came from both men and women who scored high on a psychometric depression scale but who were not receiving medication. There were no reported increases in other antioxident-rich foods, or other sources of caffeine, fat or sugar, between these depressed adults and non-depressed adults, just the increased chocolate consumption. What is not known is why the chocolate intake increased.

The evolutionary hypothesis explains our liking of chocolate as a combination of pleasures – the sweetness, the creamy texture in the mouth perhaps in some way reminiscent of breast milk – with the high energy-denseness of this food. But there is a complete lack of evidence that breast milk, even in mothers who do eat a lot of chocolate, has any chocolate flavour! So this does not explain why consumption of chocolate rather than any other sweet and creamy food increased in depressed people. Is it the pleasure which is the key factor? Or is it the cultural perception of chocolate as a reward food? Or is there another reason?

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Why does lithium therapy work for bipolar disorder?

June 21, 2010 by .

Whilst it’s been known for years that lithium drugs help many bipolar patients to manage their disorder, it hasn’t been known how lithium acts.  But now there is a clue! Laboratory studies show a link between lithium and an enzyme known as PO*. This enzyme controls a group of genes which affect brain cells’ sensitivity to lithium. And one of those genes, ImpA2, is also associated with bipolar disorder in some sufferers. So possibly there is a functional connection between ImpA2 and bipolar disorder, which can be mediated by lithium. Understanding this link could lead the way to better treatments for bipolar depression.

*PO=prolyl oligopeptidase

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Depression and being female

June 19, 2010 by .

We’ve known for ages that far more females than males suffer from depression and anxiety disorders, but it is frequently hypothesised that this is not the true state of things. This is because, in Western industrialised cultures, it is more acceptable to admit vulnerability especially psychological vulnerability if one is female, not male. The macho nature of these cultures is, if you like, a confounding variable. However, there could be more to this than social and cultural relativism.

A recent interesting finding in rats shows that females are definitely more sensitive to stress. Their brain cells respond far more strongly to the precursor to corticosteroid stress hormones, a neurochemical called corticotropin-releasing factor, CRF. Female rat neurons are activated by CRF, male rat neurons adapt to it and less stress hormones are produced.

But does this rat behaviour also happen in humans? Well, we don’t know; but we do know that CRF regulation gets disrupted in human stress-related psychological disorders, so there could be a similarity, although one needs always to be very careful in generalising between species.

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Exercise as part of therapy?

May 17, 2010 by .

Three recent small studies (see here or here) looked at the effects of various 12-16 week exercise programmes  on sufferers from schizophrenia. The types of exercise varied from more physically strenuous ones, such as strength training and jogging, to less energetic yoga.

There were small improvements in physical health but greater improvements were found in mental states. Improvements in anxiety and depression from exercise were greater than similar improvements in standard care without an exercise component.

These studies support the findings of two earlier studies, which suggests the importance of further research into the effects of exercise programmes in the treatment of schizophrenia plus initiatives looking into how to implement such programmes and engage sufferers in taking part.

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Psychiatric Tales by Daryl Cunningham

April 2, 2010 by .

The excellent online comic strips about mental health that we first mentioned here, have now been collected into a fantastic book

Further details and links to many excerpts via Mindhacks here

Very moving last chapter can now be viewed here

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To sleep, perchance to dream … or commit murder?

February 16, 2010 by .

Some sleep disorders are well known – sleep-walking for example. But in very unusual cases people who sleepwalk behave in a highly unusual way, this is a very rare form of the disorder somnambulism when they commite violent acts.

In 2008 in the UK a middle aged man with a long history of sleep disorders actually killed his wife whilst they were both asleep. This tragedy happened when they were on holiday and the man in question had decided not to take his medication. He had a nighmare, thought he was struggling with assailants, but when he woke he found his wife dead. There is no reason to suspect that the couple were not happy together, and sleep disorder experts and the police accept that this unhappy case is one of temporary  “insane automatism”.

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Why antidepressants don’t work

January 16, 2010 by .

Long-time depression researcher Eva Redei recently reported some of her latest findings. She has spent decades breeding rats who are severely depressed (mating depressed rats with depressed rats so you get ‘who are believed to be the most depressed rats in the world’ (!!)). This meant she could identify genes linked to depression. Next she exposed a different group of rats to stressful situations for two weeks which enabled her to identify the genes that consistently were associated with a poor response to stress.

The big news is that there was no overlap between the depression genes and the stress genes. This suggests that the idea that stress causes depression may be wrong. And, furthermore, she claims the reason antidepressants are often ineffective is because they treat stress and not depression and she has now shown that the two are not linked, though they may co-occur. So that’s one reason why antidepressants only work for some people (those suffering from stress and depression). Before you say ‘ah well, this is just an effect in rats’, Redei claims that rat brains are very similar to human brains, so it is reasonably to draw analogies. It also may explain why we like cheese. (No, that last bit was a joke).

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Birth

January 3, 2010 by .

Daniel Askill – WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE from Cgunit on Vimeo. Most psychodynamically-oriented approaches emphasise the central role of some kind of childhood trauma, and in some cases this trauma is believed to be the act of birth itself.

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