At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans, scientists presented evidence that stress can modify a brain’s chemistry, resulting in long-term mental health issues, NPR reported.
Current treatments fail to adequately address the link between stress and depression, yet this new research could provide clues about how stress impacts the circuitry of the brain. And an intimate understanding of this connection could lead to new methods of treating depression that has resulted from stress.
“That’s the holy grail and we’re moving in that direction,” Dipesh Chaudhury of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York told NPR.
Chaudhury told NPR that an extremely stressful experience can cause depression by interfering with the brain’s “reward system”: when we eat good foods or spend time with people we love, we experience feelings of pleasure. People suffering from PTSD or from major depression tend to no longer enjoy things that used to give them pleasure.
Chaudhury also said that mice react in a similar fashion to traumatic events. His research indicates that this response can be prevented when the activity of certain brain cells which are tied to the reward system are reduced. Chaudhury said his hope is to create a drug which could eliminate some of these cells in the human brain.
Katherine Landergan 