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According to the World Health Organisation WHO, 350 million people worldwide are affected by depression. But the mental state is not all that is affected, however, and depression can also compromise the body. "Meanwhile there is little doubt that depression is a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases," explains Karl-Heinz Ladwig. He is group leader at the Institute of Epidemiology II at the Helmholtz Zentrum München, professor of psychosomatic medicine at TUM's Klinikum rechts der Isar as well as scientist of DZHK. "The question now is: What is the relationship between depression and other risk factors like tobacco smoke, high cholesterol levels, obesity or hypertension -- how big a role does each factor play?" In order to examine this question, Ladwig and his team analyzed data from 3,428 male patients between the ages of 45 and 74 years and observed their development over a period of ten years. "The work is based on a prospective population-based da...

Testimony therapy included individual counselling, whereby the clients told their life stories, including traumatic events, and counselors provided support and documented the details of the narratives. After sessions, the counselors transcribed the narratives, which were compiled into books for the clients. Next, a culturally adapted ceremony involved a Buddhist ritual and a truth-telling event to which community members and non-governmental organization representatives were invited. "We found that testimony therapy was effective at reducing the symptoms of anxiety, depression, and PTSD among Khmer Rouge survivors. This is especially notable because the intervention was brief (five days), culturally adapted (and adaptable), and was conducted in a low resource context," said Dr. Jennifer Esala, co-author of the  Journal of Traumatic Stress  study. "We hope that these findings encourage researchers to continue to study testimony therapy more closely and for practitione...

The researchers found that a protein called JNK when active, represses the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that controls emotions and learning. By inhibiting JNK solely in newly generated nerve cells in the hippocampus, the researchers were able to alleviate anxiety and depressive behaviour in mice. This previously unknown mechanism brings fresh insight on how the brain works to regulate mood and indicates that inhibitors of JNK, such as the one used here, can provide a new avenue for anti-depressant and anxiolytic drug development. Depression and anxiety are highly prevalent disorders and represent one of the largest causes of disability worldwide. These results are important as many patients do not respond to current treatments and it has long been recognised that new mechanistic understanding of these disorders would be necessary to in order to identify drugs for treatment resistant depression. The research was funded by the EU-funded Marie Cu...

Antidepressant use throughout being pregnant has the potential to intrude with serotonin consumption by the fetus, which may end up in malformations , say investigators. Credit score: © Photographee.eu / Fotolia A brand new Université de Montréal examine within the British Medical Journal reveals that antidepressants prescribed to pregnant girls may improve the prospect of getting a child with beginning defects. The chance -- 6 to 10 %, versus three to five % in girls who don't take the medication -- is excessive sufficient to benefit warning of their use, particularly since, usually, they're solely marginally efficient, the examine says. "In being pregnant, you are treating the mom however you are fearful concerning the unborn youngster, and the profit must outweigh the danger," stated the examine's senior creator, Anick Bérard, a professor at UdeM's College of Pharmacy and researcher at its affiliated kids's hospital, CHU Sainte-Just...

The researchers also established that women with a history of depression are more than 20 times more likely to experience PPD than mothers without a previous clinical diagnosis of depression. And while gestational diabetes alone increased risk for PPD, a history of maternal depression in conjunction with gestational diabetes further increased the likelihood of PPD. "Most practitioners think of these as two isolated and very different conditions, but we now understand gestational diabetes and postpartum depression should be considered together," says Michael E. Silverman, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and lead author of the study. "While having diabetes increases PPD risk for all women, for those women who have had a past depressive episode, having diabetes during pregnancy makes it 70 percent more likely that they will develop PPD." In addition to gestational diabetes, the researchers studied more t...

The study, published in  Lancet Psychiatry , found that 14-year-old adolescents who had contact with mental health services had a greater decrease in depressive symptoms than those with similar difficulties but without contact. By the age of 17, the odds of reporting clinical depression were more than seven times higher in individuals without contact than in service users who had been similarly depressed at baseline. Researchers from the Department of Psychiatry recruited 1,238 14-year-old adolescents and their primary caregivers from secondary schools in Cambridgeshire, and followed them up at the age of 17. Their mental state and behaviour was assessed by trained researchers, while the teenagers self-reported their depressive symptoms. Of the participants, 126 (11%) had a current mental illness at start of the study -- and only 48 (38%) of these had had contact with mental health services in the year prior to recruitment. Contact with mental health services appeared to be o...