New Approaches Could Bring Better Depression Treatments

Jan. 6 -- TUESDAY, Jan. 5 (HealthDay News) -- There's been some bad news over the past couple of days for Americans battling depression.

On Monday, a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that just one in five depressed adults get guideline-recommended treatment, and on Tuesday a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that conventional antidepressants may only really be useful for the severely depressed.

Why -- with depression such a widespread problem, and billions invested in the research and development of new treatments -- are so many people still suffering?

One team of scientists in Chicago believe they have at least part of the answer. They say that the reason about half of people who need antidepressants don't respond to available drugs is that researchers have been focusing on the wrong neurological targets.

Developing effective drugs will require a whole new paradigm of thought, contends Eve Redei, a psychiatry professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University, in Chicago.

"There hasn't been a novel antidepressant in 20 years," Redei pointed out. "All [of the current drugs] have the same mechanism of action."

The largest effectiveness study ever done on depression -- Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) -- examined the benefits of antidepressants in "real-world" settings. It found that, although many people battling depression don't get better with the first drug they try, remission can be achieved in 50 percent of those who add a drug to their regimen or switch to a new medication.

Redei, who presented results of her new research at the Neuroscience 2009 conference in Chicago this fall, said she hoped to disprove two basic assumptions: that stress causes depression and that reduced levels of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine also spur depression.

Her team used a "unique" animal model of depression which, Redei said, "mimics as many aspects of human depression as an animal model can."