Rebuilding broken brains

• Autores: Samantha Murphy
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2927, 2013, págs. 34-37
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Murphy discusses the rise of treatment-resistant depression. The steady rise in this diagnosis over the past two decades reflects a little-known trend. The effectiveness of some antidepressant drugs has been overstated, so much so that some pharmaceutical companies have stopped researching them altogether. The stubborn nature of these cases of depression has, however, spurred research into new and sometimes unorthodox treatments. Surprising and impressive results suggest that they have fundamentally misunderstood the disorder. The dominant theory is that depression results from a chemical imbalance in the brain, with the neurotransmitter serotonin as the prime suspect. Many trials have linked depression to low levels of serotonin, something that was thought to disrupt the brain's ability to pass messages across synapses, the tiny gaps between neurons.