Although there are therapies for depression, many people occasionally find these treatments unhelpful. In addition, women are more prone than men to experience depression, albeit there is no established reason for this difference. This occasionally makes treating their diseases more difficult.
This month, a study’s results were published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. Researchers from the University of California, Davis collaborated with scholars from Princeton University, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Laval University, Quebec, in an effort to comprehend how the nucleus accumbens, a particular region of the brain, is impacted during the depression. Depression has an impact on the nucleus accumbens, which is crucial for motivation, reaction to pleasurable experiences, and social connections.
Previous studies in the nucleus accumbens revealed that whereas men with depression did not have any of these genes turned on or off, women did. These alterations may have contributed to depressive symptoms, or conversely, being depressed itself may have altered the brain. The researchers examined mice that had been exposed to unfavourable social interactions, which are more likely to cause depression-related behaviour in females than males.
“Understanding the long-lasting consequences of stress on the brain is made much easier because to these high-throughput analyses. Negative social interactions altered the gene expression patterns of female mice in our mouse model, and these patterns resembled those seen in depressed women “UC Davis recent graduate and PhD researcher Alexia Williams, who developed and oversaw these studies, said as much.
