major depression tagged posts

This “Manhattan plot” shows the locations of the 44 major depression loci on the human genome. The vertical axis shows statistical significance. The higher the more significant. Everything shown above the red horizontal line is statistically significant.

A new meta-analysis of more than 135,000 people with major depression and more than 344,000 controls has identified 44 genomic variants, or loci, that have a statistically significant association with depression. Of these 44 loci, 30 are newly discovered while 14 had been identified in previous studies. In addition, the study identified 153 significant genes, and found that major depression shared six loci that are also associated with schizophrenia.

Results from the multinational, genome-wide association study were published April 26 ...

Formation and function of microRNAs

A tiny RNA appears to play a role in producing major depression, the mental disorder that affects as many as 250 million people a year worldwide. Major depression, formally known as major depressive disorder, or MDD, brings increased risk of suicide and is reported to cause the second-most years of disability after low-back pain.

MicroRNA levels are significantly elevated in the brains of experimental rats with induced depression from corticosterone treatment, in the post-death brains of humans diagnosed with MDD and in peripheral blood serum from living patients with MDD, according to a study by led by Prof Yogesh Dwivedi, Ph.D.
This microRNA—miR-124-3p—is thus a potential therapeutic target for novel drug development, and it can serve as a putative bio...

Anatomy of hippocampal circuit into which new neurons integrate. Neurogenesis is localized to the dentate gyrus (DG) region, where only excitatory granule cells are continually produced throughout life. The DG has a complex local circuitry, with both inhibitory interneurons and excitatory feedback neurons (mossy cells) participating in the network’s behavior. Granule cells in the DG project to the CA3 region, which in addition to a robust recurrent connection then projects to the CA1 region. The CA1 then projects back to the entorhinal cortex and subiculum regions, closing the “hippocampal loop.”

Stressful events result in epigenetic modifications within immediate-early genes in hippocampus neurons...