serotonin tagged posts

If you’ve heard of two of the brain’s chemical neurotransmitters, it’s probably dopamine and serotonin. Never mind that glutamate and GABA do most of the work—it’s the thrill of dopamine as the “pleasure chemical” and serotonin as a tender mood-stabilizer that attract all the headlines.

Of course, the headlines mostly get it wrong. Dopamine’s role in shaping behavior goes way beyond simple concepts like “pleasure” or even “reward”...

An international team of medical researchers has found a link between major depressive disorder (MDD) and an interplay between the gut microbiome and the blood metabolome. For their study, reported in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, the group analyzed data in the UK Biobank.

Some prior research has suggested there may be a link between MDD and conditions surrounding the gut biome, but little work has been done to prove a connection, and existing studies were too small to show any true connections. In this new effort, the researchers attempted to conduct a far more broad study of any such connections by studying data in the UK Biobank—a massive database of health and genetic information for nearly a half-million patients in the U.K.

The researchers...

Excess fat triggers immune cells to overeat serotonin in the brain of developing male mice, leading to depression-like behavior. More than half of all women in the United States are overweight or obese when they become pregnant. While being or becoming overweight during pregnancy can have potential health risks for moms, there are also hints that it may tip the scales for their kids to develop psychiatric disorders like autism or depression, which often affects one gender more than the other.

What hasn’t been understood however is how the accumulation of fat tissue in mom might signal through the ...

New findings from Flinders University have demonstrated a molecular link between COVID-19 and serotonin cells in the gut.

The research could help provide further clues to what could be driving COVID-19 infection and disease severity and supports previous evidence that antidepressants, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), could reduce the severity of COVID symptoms.

COVID-19 displays an array of symptoms, which can regularly include gastrointestinal issues such as diarrhoea. Recent research has indicated that these gut symptoms in COVID-19 patients worsen with the severity of the disease, and this is linked to heightened gut-derived serotonin, released to cause gut dysfunction, increasing the body’s immune response and potentially worsening patient outcomes.