Journal of psychiatric research
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We performed an updated meta-analysis of noradrenalin reuptake inhibitor (NRI) augmentation therapy in patients with schizophrenia treated with antipsychotics based on a previous meta-analysis (Singh et al.). ⋯ NRIs may exert an effect on depressive symptoms, and seem to be well-tolerated treatments.
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Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasant stimuli. Although anhedonia is a prominent feature of many psychiatric disorders, trait anhedonia is also observed dimensionally in healthy individuals. Currently, the neurobiological basis of anhedonia is poorly understood because it has been mainly investigated in patients with psychiatric disorders. ⋯ Our results indicate that trait anhedonia is associated with reduced reactivity and connectivity of mesolimbic and related limbic and paralimbic systems involved in reward processing. Critically, this association can be detected even in individuals without psychiatric illness. Our findings have important implications both for understanding the neurobiological basis of anhedonia and for the treatment of anhedonia in psychiatric disorders.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Effects of doxycycline on depressive-like behavior in mice after lipopolysaccharide (LPS) administration.
Current evidences support inflammation, oxidative and nitrogen stress, as well as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) signaling mechanisms as important in depression pathophysiology. Tetracycline antibiotics have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Preliminary evidence indicates that minocycline has antidepressant properties. ⋯ IMI and DOXY also prevented and reversed LPS-induced alterations in nitrite content and oxidative stress parameters (lipid peroxidation and reduced glutathione levels). Both DOXY and IMI prevented LPS-induced decrease in hippocampal BDNF levels. Taken together, our results demonstrate that DOXY is comparable to IMI in effectively ameliorate LPS-induced depressive-like behavior, providing a rationale for testing DOXY's antidepressant efficacy in humans.
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Mental disorders are associated with premature mortality, and the magnitudes of risk have commonly been estimated using hospital data. However, psychiatric patients who are hospitalized have more severe illness and do not adequately represent mental disorders in the general population. We conducted a national cohort study using outpatient and inpatient diagnoses for the entire Swedish adult population (N = 7,253,516) to examine the extent to which mortality risks are overestimated using inpatient diagnoses only. ⋯ The sole use of inpatient diagnoses resulted in even greater overestimation of all-cause or suicide mortality risks when prevalent cases were unidentified (~20-30%) or excluded (~25-40%). However, different methods for handling prevalent cases resulted in only modest variation in risk estimates when using both inpatient and outpatient diagnoses. These findings have important implications for the interpretation of hospital-based studies and the design of future studies.
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Many features of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be linked to exaggerated and dysregulated emotional responses. Central to the neurocircuitry regulating emotion are functional interactions between the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Findings from human and animal studies suggest that disruption of this circuit predicts individual differences in emotion regulation. ⋯ Participants with PTSD showed decreased functional connectivity between the right amygdala and left vmPFC (p(corr) < .05). The findings are consistent with previous findings showing PTSD is associated with an exaggerated response of amygdala-mediated emotional arousal systems. This is the first study to show that the amygdala response may be accompanied by disruption of an amygdala-vmPFC functional circuit that is hypothesized to be involved in prefrontal cortical regulation of amygdala responsivity.