Scientists have identified blood markers that may help understand why antidepressant drugs do not successfully alleviate depression in everyone.<\/p>\n
Researchers from University Medical Center Mainz and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany developed a mouse model that allowed them to identify blood signatures associated with response to antidepressant treatment and could show the importance of the stress-related glucocorticoid receptor in recovery from depression.<\/p>\n
Major depression is the leading cause of disability according to the World Health Organization, affecting an estimated 350 million people worldwide, but only one-third of patients benefit from the first antidepressant prescribed.<\/p>\n
Although the currently available treatments are safe, there is significant variability in the outcome of antidepressant treatment.<\/p>\n
So far there are no clinical assessments that can predict with a high degree of certainty whether a particular patient will respond to a particular antidepressant.<\/p>\n
Finding the most effective antidepressant medication for each patient depends on trial and error, underlining the urgent need to establish conceptually novel strategies for the identification of biomarkers associated with a positive response.<\/p>\n
To tackle this challenge, scientists established a novel experimental approach in animals focusing on extreme phenotypes in response to antidepressant treatment. This model simulated the clinical situation, by identifying good and poor responders to antidepressant treatment.<\/p>\n
They hypothesised that conditions in the mouse model would facilitate the identification of valid peripheral biomarkers for antidepressant treatment response and could potentially apply to humans.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were able to identify a cluster of antidepressant response-associated genes in the mouse model that we then validated in a cohort of depressed patients from our collaborators from Emory University, Atlanta,\u201d said Tania Carrillo-Roa from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry.<\/p>\n
This suggests that molecular signatures associated with antidepressant response in the mouse could in fact predict the outcome of antidepressant treatment in the patient cohort.<\/p>\n
Additional analyses indicated that the glucocorticoid receptor, which is one of the most important players in fine- tuning the stress hormone system, shapes the response to antidepressant treatment.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, identification of biomarkers predictive of individual responses to treatment would dramatically improve the quality of care\/ treatment for depressed patients by taking the trial and error out of prescribing antidepressants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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