For men whose depression hasn’t responded to medication, there may be an explanation: scientist have identified three new subtypes and one of them is drug-resistant.
Research on new types of depression
Researchers at the Neural Computation Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University looked at the data of 134 people, 50% of whom had been diagnosed with depression.
They used blood tests and questionnaires to gather information about mental health, stress, sleep patterns and each person’s history. They also used MRIs to look at brain activity and map 78 regions of the brain, as well as the connections between these regions.
The team broke down over 3,000 measurable features, such as childhood trauma and severity of depression, into five data clusters. They found that three of those data clusters with different subtypes.
They predicted whether SSIRs would be able to treat the disorder by looking at the connections between the brain areas and the angular gyrus region of the brain.
One of the subtypes of depression, which correlated with high functional connectivity and childhood trauma, didn’t respond to SSRIs.
The other two subtypes, which correlated with low brain connectivity and no childhood trauma, responded well to drugs.
Although it may sound like bad news for men who fit the former subtype profile, it’s good news in the sense that you may not waste time trying to treat it with an SSRI that won’t work. It’s possible that a new drug treatment will be able to help this subtype, saving you a lot of frustration.
Depression in the United States
Depression affects at last 16 million people in the U.S. alone and up to 30% of people living with the disorder don’t get any relief from current treatments. These numbers and this research may be enough to spur new drug trials to help those who don’t see results from SSRIs
