Good article About Depression Research ?

Q.What we're working on here is to come up with something completely different, that will be much better?

A.For some people, depression might be "a stress response that gets stuck in the 'on' position," said NIMH researcher Dr. Philip Gold, who is studying a drug that lowers brain levels of the key stress chemical corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). Gold thinks the compound, known as antalarmin, might work especially well in melancholic depression, a subtype in which patients are overagitated and anxious. head of clinical research at Neurogen Corp., a Connecticut biotech company working on a CRH antagonist. The company hopes to begin human trials next year. Another possible target is glutamate, a neurotransmitter that sends excitatory messages, telling the brain to pay attention. Too much glutamate overstimulates and damages nerve cells, and researchers suspect that this chemical system goes awry in depression. In animal tests, lowering glutamate levels improves depressive behavior and has recently been shown to stimulate neurogenesis. Scientists are increasingly recognizing that, as the riluzole results suggest, depression is probably not a single disorder, but rather a collection of related subtypes. All depressives feel unhappy and hopeless, but some are agitated and sleepless, and others hardly move and can hardly stay awake. "It's likely that depression is actually several different biological conditions," Not all of these ideas will pan out. Anti-depressant research is notoriously frustrating. What cheers up rats - even those bred for despair - doesn't always revive unhappy humans. And, because depression is so complex and subjective, what works with one group of humans often fails with another. But most scientists are confident that some of the research will end up helping patients. We're really learning a lot more about what might actually be going on with the illness, Clearly, some things will work and some won't work. But there's every reason to be optimistic.

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