Depression Sucks

In Related News: (of sorts) Maybe this development will help people in this guy's position as well.


This development might help though. It's at a point in the scientific (not manufacturing) process where they realize what was causing something else. Now they've just got to find how and why it has such effects so that those can be modulated with medical precision.

[Link] The newly found protein, named p11, appears to regulate how brain cells respond to serotonin, researchers from Rockefeller University and Sweden's Karolinska Institute report Friday in the journal Science.

"We're all very excited about this discovery," said Nobel laureate Paul Greengard, a Rockefeller neuroscientist who led the research. "People have been looking for modulators of serotonin for a long time."

My fingers are crossed. Well, you know what I mean.

_Depressed people have substantially lower levels of p11 in their brain tissue than the non-depressed. So did a breed of mice, called "helpless" mice, that exhibit depression symptoms.

Yep. I've never feel much like a sheople, but freakin' helpless mouse about describes me when I get depressed about some of the decisions I've made throughout my life. If they can find that the cause effecting my poor decision making in regards to money and women (in that order) is genetical and physical, than I'm willing to foot a personally significant portion of the bill ($240 mo on my current HMO.)

_So the researchers bred mice that had no p11-producing gene. They acted depressed, and had fewer 1B receptors and less serotonin activity than regular mice. They also were less likely to improve with depression medication.

Never would've guessed that genetic therapy could work; even backwards.

Mice genetically altered to produce extra p11 acted in just the opposite way — no depression-like behavior, and their brain cells carried extra serotonin-signaling receptors.

Now to me, that sounds like substantial proof of the p11 concept. I wonder if ...

"The p11 is upstream of the receptor, and now the question is what is upstream of the p11," Greengard said.

Sure. What's the trigger's trigger?

But Sharp noted that bouts of depression often are associated with serious stress, and that p11 is part of a protein family known to be sensitive to certain stress-related hormones.

Shi.. oot. Sounds like the Chicken and the Egg all over again. If the quantity of p11 is genetically determined and a person is short on it from it's egg and sperm, then this track of research could be a motherload of new treatments for depression. Nano-molecular biology is what they used to produce those mice. Both phenotypes. Again, to me, it sounds like this would be a stemcell project eventually.

But if the low-dose of p11 is more because of a susceptibility to change from stress of other sources, then, even if it doesn't fix a defect, it may still be a short term treatment with higher than current probability of success. One can hope.