Linking Molecules to Mood: New Insight Into the Biology of Depression

By V. Krishnan, E. Nestler. American Journal of Psychiatry, 2010

660 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Major depressive disorder is a heritable neuropsychiatric syndrome characterized by relatively subtle cellular and molecular alterations localized to a complex network of neural substrates. These brain regions display dynamic neuroplastic adaptations to endocrine and immunologic stimuli arising from within and outside the central nervous system. Depression’s clinical and etiological heterogeneity adds a third level of complexity, implicating different pathophysiological mechanisms in different patients with the same DSM diagnosis. Current pharmacological antidepressant treatments improve depressive symptoms through complex mechanisms that are themselves incompletely understood. This review summarizes our current knowledge of the neurobiology of depression by combining insights from human clinical studies and molecular explanations from animal models. We provide recommendations for future research, with a focus on translating today’s discoveries into improved diagnostic tests and treatments.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Biological Psychiatry, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f2c45f3ed88de25a499d673c2155e15baf309e49

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In Behavioral Neuroscience

1. Monika Bijata
2. Svitlana Antoniuk
3. J. Włodarczyk
4. E. Ponimaskin

In Biological Psychiatry

1. Monika Bijata
2. Svitlana Antoniuk
3. J. Włodarczyk
4. E. Ponimaskin

In Social Psychology

1. Monika Bijata
2. Svitlana Antoniuk
3. J. Włodarczyk
4. E. Ponimaskin

Citations in the corpus

• Chronic unpredictable mild stress for modeling depression in rodents: Meta‐analysis of model reliability (2019, positive): “Abnormalities of HPA axis function are one of the most consistent biological findings across several mental disorders, and alterations of HPA axis activity in either direction can result in depressive features (Krishnan and Nestler, 2010; Zunszain et al., 2011).”
• A standardized protocol for repeated social defeat stress in mice (2011, neutral): “Multivariate ANOVAs reveal a significant interaction between phenotype and time spent in the interaction zone, in which susceptible mice spend less time when the target is present than control and resilient mice (F(2,266) = 53.”
• COGNITIVE DEFICITS AND FUNCTIONAL OUTCOMES IN MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER: DETERMINANTS, SUBSTRATES, AND TREATMENT INTERVENTIONS (2013, background): “Contemporary models of disease pathoetiology in MDD have been extensively reviewed elsewhere.[41] Progress in molecular and cellular biology as well as results from neuroimaging investigations have served to refine the hypothesis that disparate domains of psychopathology in MDD are subserved by abno”
• Understanding the somatic consequences of depression: biological mechanisms and the role of depression symptom profile (2013, background): “Leptin receptors are expressed in limbic substrates related to mood regulation, and in animal models leptin exerts antidepressant behavioral effects [68].”