'Treating Depression:

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•  'Treating Depression
• Fifty Years on and Still No Progress?'

• Current antidepressants are not significantly
  more advanced than those first developed in the
  1950s
• and this is a consequence of the general failure
  of a drug discovery process
• that concentrates on the development of new
  pharmacological tools, instead of treatments or
  cures.

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Depression Symptoms

• Sleep Disturbance
• Change in appetite
• Anhedonia
• Fatigue
• Morbid thoughts
• Misery
• Suicidal ideations
• Possible suicide

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Depression Incidence

• 3-4 at any one time
• 25 over a lifetime
• 2-3 times more prevalent in females
• Link with genes
• life-events
• Incidence increasing

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Depression Treatment
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Drug treatments designed to increase levels of
Noradrenaline and Serotonin
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Drug Treatments Problems

• Take 4-6 weeks to work
• Patients made to feel worse before they feel
  better
• Only 80 respond to treatment
• Physical side-effects/Non-compliance
• No major advances in over 50 years

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50 Years
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50 Years
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If progress had been made at the same rate
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So What Went Wrong?
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Concentration on Treatment not Disorder
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Reduced Blood Flow in Brains of Depressed Patients
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Recurrent depression correlated with 10-15
hippocampal shrinkage compared to controls
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
(USA) 93 3908-3913 (1996) Hippocampal Atrophy in
Recurrent Major Depression Y.I. Sheline, P.W.
Yang, M.N. Gado, J.C. Csernansky M.W. Vannier
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90 of Cells in Brain are Glial Cells.These are
the link between capillaries and neurons
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Past 50 YearsWealth of New Pharmacological
Tools but No New Treatments

• Major anatomical changes in the CNS of depressed
  patients
• 4-6 Week therapeutic lag
• Current antidepressants work to some extent but
  probably only by accident
• and not for the reasons they are supposed to

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