Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0011570 (depression)
 172,036 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Blood platelet serotonin levels were measured in unmedicated 12 manic and 74 depressive patients with 118 normal control subjects employed. Blood platelets were separated by multiple contrifugation in the medium of Na2-EDTA solution, and the loss of serotonin during collecting procedures was about 11%. The mean value of blood platelet serotonin levels in depressed patients was 594+/-288ng/mg platelet protein (+/- S.D.), which was significantly lower than that for normal controls, 780 +/- 253ng/mg protein (p less than 0.001). Age does not account for the reduction of serotonin levels both in depressed and in normal population. Unipolar and involutional depressed patients exhibited to have the most pronounced reduced levels of serotonin of various subtypes of depression, while bipolar depressed patients, neurotic and chronic characterological depressed patients as well as patients with first-episode depression had the values which were comparable with those in normal controls. Manic patients did not show enhancement but did reduction of serotonin levels, the mean being 580+/-152ng/mg protein, which made a contrast with their clinical manifestations of exhilaration and hyperactivity. Changes in blood platelet serotonin levels were determined before, during and after administration of L-5-HTP with a maintenance dose of 300mg daily in nine depressed patients. Serotonin levels in all subjects were lifted to normal levels during the L-5-HTP treatment, while clinical symptoms were not improved with the treatment. Reduction of blood platelet serotonin levels in depressed patients may be due to their psychobiological distinction, which involves abnormal biogenic amine metabolism in the brain.
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PMID:Reduction of blood platelet serotonin levels in manic and depressed patients. 108 14

In the first part of this overview the author reviewed the clinical literature on prophylactic treatment of schizophrenia with maintenance antipsychotic drugs. In this second part he reviews the literature on maintenance treatment of affective disorders with lithium and tricyclics. He concludes that the growing realization that maintenance treatment is necessary to prevent recurrences of both mania and depression in bipolar disease and depression in unipolar disease is one of the most important advances in psychiatric therapeutics. The effectiveness of maintenance treatment provides the potential for a truly preventive approach to the treatment of affective disorders.
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PMID:Overview: maintenance therapy in psychiatry: II. Affective disorders. 110 74

The argument has been advanced that pathological states of anxiety and mania are both characterized by a failure on the part of the patient to attach appropriate levels of significance to changes occurring in the immediate environment. There is, it is suggested, a tendency for environmental features to be regarded as important even though, viewed objectively, they may have little relevance to the patient and his needs. Depression, it is further proposed, may be viewed as an extreme defense reaction to the intense anxiety which results from attaching too much significance to environmental events. In depressive state, patients are often characterised by their lowered responsiveness to stimulation and their lack of interest in, or concern about, their surroundings: it may be that, in such state, information processing has been blocked or reduced. The daytime drowsiness of the depressed patients, as well as his night-time sleep disturbance and the frequently observed recurrent or cyclic nature of certain kinds of depressed state, suggest that this blocking of sensory processing may be brought about by the involuntary intervention of mechanisms responsible, under normal circumstances, for sleep induction. This view of the nature of depression has been recast into the form of five potentially testable hypotheses. Speculation is always easy; providing convincing demonstrations that those speculations are reasonable is less easy. It is in the nature of psychological investigation that laboratory-based studies distort and may even destroy the phenomena about which information is sought, and many a perfectly reasonable theory has foundered upon the rocks of translation into experimental terms. In those areas of psychology which have implications for psychiatry and the conceptualisation of psychopathological states, this danger is particularly evident: psychiatric syndromes are complex, variable, and have social referrents, but laboratory experiments are limited in their capacity to reflect all these attributes, and consequently they may never provide really adequate tests of a theory about a psychiatric state. We have to try to come to terms with this apparent impasse--in the first place by being circumspect in translating psychiatric concepts into experimental terms, and secondly by exercising caution in interpreting the results to which the experiments give rise. More importantly, however, we have to accept the essential inadequacy of the majority of experimental paradigms in psychiatric research and to regard theorizing--even when it is not linked to explicitly testable hypotheses--as having inherent value.
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PMID:Depression: some proposals for future research. 114 55

Twenty-four hour urinary excretion of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxphaeylglycol (MHPG), the metabolite thought best to reflect brain norepinephrine metabolism, was studied longitudinally in ten depressed patients before and during the acute and chronic phases of lithium treatment. Five of the patients were identified as bipolar I (prior history of mania), 3 as bipolar II (history of hypomania) and 2 as unipolar (history of depression). During acute lithium administration (first week) there was no consistent pattern of change in MHPG. Comparing the predrug period with the third and fourth week of treatment, all of the responders showed an increase in MHPG, while the non-responders showed no change or a decrease. It is concluded that the change in clinical state is the most important variable contributing to MHPG changes in these patients. There was a tendency for the pretreatment MHPG excretion to be low in the patients who went on to show a clear-cut antidepressant response to lithium compared to those who were unequivocal non-responders. The predrug MHPG for the bipolar patients (prior history of mania) was significantly lower than the unipolar patients, a difference which apparently contributes to the lower MHPG in the lithium responders, all of whom were in the bipolar group.
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PMID:The effect of lithium on urinary MHPG in unipolar and bipolar depressed patients. 116 86

The ZERSSEN Mood Scale or " Befindlichkeits-Skala " is the only self-rating scale that is altogether specific (adjectives on mood states essentially), actual and therefore sensitive (lack of adjectives on the habitual state, on personality traits), bipolar (possible detection of a manic or depressive shift), easy to administrate and analyze, existing under 2 statistically equivalent forms. Each BS and BS' form contains 28 pairs of antonymic everyday adjectives, whose French translation has been checked by back-translation. The subject has to cross if he feels right now " rather... ", " rather... " or " neither nor ". The French translation was tested on 100 depressed and 6 manic newly hospitalized patients, on 30 depressed patients in the course of a 6-week antidepressant trial, and on 46 academic and administrative members of the staff. Various calculations on the validity, reliability and sensitivity of the scale confirm the original German data. The product-moment correlation between BS and BS' (split-half reliability) reaches .89 in the control group, .79 in the newly hospitalized depressives and .93 to .96 in the anti-depressant trial, a p less than .001 in all three studies. The correlation does not reach a significant level in neurotic depressives, who are a mean 11 y. younger than psychotic depressives and score significantly lower than the latter. Age, sex and sequence of administration do not influence the means, the standard deviations and the correlation between BS and BS'. The original German studies and our original French ones give convergent results as for means and extreme scores of the main mood levels, with a cutting score for mania at 6 and for depression at 27 : (see article) Thanks to their high intercorrelation, the BS and BS' scales may be given independently, thus allowing a daily or even twice daily administration. The range of application of the ZERSSEN Mood Scale is not limited to psychiatry but includes numerous medical, surgical and psychological fields.
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PMID:[Self-rating of mood using a list of adjectives, Zersen's Befindlichkeits-Skala (BS)]. 117 1

A systematic interview regarding family history was administered to 48 men with bipolar affective illness who were attending a lithium clinic. Several families were found in which both the patient and father had affective disorders, but the mother and maternal second-degree relatives were well. Of 30 men who had histories of hospitalization for mania, three had fathers with affective disorder (all bipolar). Of 18 men who had depression and hypomania, one father had unipolar depressive disorder. The hypothesis that bipolar manic-depressive illness may be transmitted by a single dominant genetic factor on the X chromosome is discussed in relation to these ill father-ill son pairs.
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PMID:Psychiatric illness in fathers of men with bipolar primary affective disorder. 118 Jun 63

Adenosine diphosphate (ADP) stimulates the synthesis of prostaglandin E1 (PGE1) in lysed platelets from normal subjects, patients with affective illness but not in platelets from cases of schizophrenia. The stimulation is concentration-dependent and follows a curve which is mildly sigmoid in the normal, markedly sigmoid in depression and hyperbolic in mania.
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PMID:Effect of ADP on PGE1 formation in blood platelets from patients with depression, mania and schizophrenia. 120 54

Both in periodic catatonia and in manic-depressive disorders sudden switches occur in behavior, in the autonomic nervous system and in the catecholamine metabolism during the transition from interval or depression into catatonia or mania. Both the manic and the catatonic attacks seem to be superimposed on the basic depressive or schizophrenic illnesses. The attacks can be counteracted or suppressed by psychotropic drugs such as alpha-methyldopa, disulfiram, reserpine, haloperidol or chloropromazine which interfere with the catecholamine metabolism or their receptor sites. The involvement of the catecholamines may however be secondary to primary defects in the thyroid, the hypothalamus or the limbic system. The strict periodicity in periodic catatonia points to an accumulation of some active metabolite which may be produced centrally during the interval. At a certain level it may trigger the switch-mechanism and then be reduced during the catatonic phase. In periodic catatonia both the basic schizophrenic disease as well as the periodic manifestations are compensated by thyroxine-thyroid treatment.
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PMID:The switch mechanism in periodic catatonia and manic-depressive disorder. 122 77

The catecholamine theory suggests that there is a functional deficit of the catecholamine neurotransmitter, norepinephrine (NE) or dopamine (DA) at the neuronal synaptic cleft in depression and an excess in mania. Current strategies which are being utilized to investigate this theory involve: 1)studies of DA, NE, their breakdown products and synthetic and degradative enzymes in body fluids and brain tissue; 2) studies of modes of action of drug which can "activate" or decrease manic or depressive symptoms; 3) the study of pharmacological agents which affect specific aspects of NE and DA metabolism, (synthesis, release, receptor sensitivity, and degradation). The total accumlated data seems more compatible with a catecholamine hypothesis of mania than one of depression. The evidence to date does not allow one to differentiate between the importance of DA or NE either in depression of mania.
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PMID:The current status of research in the catecholamine theories of affective disorders. 122 15

Lithium cloride (10 meq/kg/day) administered to rats for 3 days before pharmacological challenge with cocaine hydrochloride (100 mg/kg) antagonized the effects of the stimulant drug on complementary constituents of serotonin synthesis. This neurobiological antagonism, as well as lithium's antagonism of the behavioral effects of other drugs that can produce extreme moods in man, suggests that lithium may work against mania and depression by "buffering" the serotonergic system--that is, by pushing two adaptive processes respectively to their upper and lower limits, which returns the net synthesis of transmitter to a "normal" range and keeps it there.
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PMID:Current research in the indoleamine hypothesis of affective disorders. 124 55


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