amygdala Archives - Gateway Psychiatric

Depression Resilience and Neural Connectivity

Peter Forster — Sun, 25 Mar 2018 18:00:53 +0000

Much has been written about risk factors for depression but we know less about depression resilience factors. Why do some people at high risk develop depression, while others do not. A study conducted at Stanford by Adina S. Fischer, MD PhD, and colleagues, suggests that increased regulation of limbic areas (the parts of the brain that are most directly involved in ...

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Poverty and Adversity Changes Brain Function

Peter Forster — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 16:42:09 +0000

A remarkable study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry identifies ways that the experience of poverty and adversity changes brain function. Specifically, the study finds that adolescents growing up in lower socioeconomic environments are more likely to have the gene that codes for the serotonin transporter protein methylated in a region that is associated with increased reactivity of the amygdala to threat. ...

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Depression Therapeutics and Mechanisms

Peter Forster — Sun, 25 Sep 2016 18:53:25 +0000

The September 15, 2016 edition of Biological Psychiatry is devoted to updates in the area of psychobiology that relate to depression and its treatment. In this blog post I will summarize some of those studies to give you a sense of what is going on in the field. Some of these studies may not be replicated in follow-up research, but some ...

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A New Model of Anxiety and Fear

Peter Forster — Sun, 18 Sep 2016 16:51:47 +0000

We often tell our patients that the treatment of anxiety is primarily through psychotherapy, in contrast to the treatment of mood disorders which is often based on medications or brain stimulation. In fact, it is one of the more frustrating aspects of psychiatry that there has been so little progress in terms of the biological treatments of anxiety and fear ...

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Why SSRIs May Increase Anxiety Short Term

Peter Forster — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:39:57 +0000

SSRIs are among the most commonly prescribed medications for chronic anxiety, but not infrequently these medications may be associated with a short term increase in symptoms that precedes the long term benefit. In an elegant series of studies published online in late August 2016 in the premier scientific journal, Nature, researchers from the NIH and the University of North Carolina at ...

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Antidepressants Alter Gene Expression

Peter Forster — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 20:55:51 +0000

An interesting study looked at similarities and differences in the effects of two medications that have anti-depressant effects and yet are extremely different in terms of how they work: ketamine and imipramine (a tricyclic antidepressant). This industry supported study looked at the effects of these two agents on a reward circuit (involving the prefrontal cortex (PFC), nucleus accumbens, hippocampus, and amygdala – ...

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Brain Morphometry Separates Bipolar vs Unipolar

Peter Forster — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 04:06:04 +0000

Brain Morphometry refers to a technique for comparing the sizes of different structures in the brain. A new study suggests that using MRI scans of brains it is possible to distinguish between bipolar and unipolar depression with some degree of accuracy (70 – 80% accuracy). The study looked at two separate groups of patients, one from Munster, Germany and one ...

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