A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island claims that fluoxetine (Prozac) works by stimulating the proliferation of progenitor nerve cells in a part of the brain called the dentate gyrus. (BBC) Discovering that the medication has this action is a long way, however, from proving that that is how it treats depression. Psychiatric medications cause many brain changes and it is difficult to pinpoint which cause their clinical benefits, which are epiphenomena, and which are consequences of the fact that the patient gets better. The article alludes to a very important fact — for this to be an explanation of how antidepressants cure depression, it would have to be shown to be a mechanism of action common to all medications that have similar antidepressant efficacy. That research remains to be done. The consensus is, however, moving away from a neurotransmitter theory of depression and of how antidepressants work to one based on, essentially, tissue repair, as we appreciate that episodes of depression actually cause physical damage to the brain from, among other things, its exposure to chronically high levels of stress hormones.
Daily Archives: 29 May 06
For Want of a Nurse
“The idea of the richest country in the world skimming the scant cream off the health care staffs of poor countries is disturbing. No one wants to close the gates to a skilled population of people. This page, which has argued that unskilled illegal immigrants should be given a path to potential citizenship, is not going to say that nurses from the Philippines should receive less favored treatment. But it is incumbent on the United States to start trying to solve this problem on its own.” (New York Times editorial)
Pimp My Grill
“…[I]ncreasingly popular …supergrills that are becoming backyard status symbols, as Americans, mostly of the male variety, peacock with an object that harks back to the earliest days of human existence…” (New York Times )
Why American College Students Hate Science
“Science education in this country faces two serious problems. The first is that too few Americans perform at the highest level in science, compared with our competitors abroad. The second problem is that large numbers of aspiring science majors, perhaps as many as half, are turned off by unimaginative teaching and migrate to other disciplines before graduating…” (New York Times )
…myself among them.
Check the Numbers:
Rumors of Classical Music’s Demise Are Dead Wrong: “[F]or all the hand-wringing, there is immensely more classical music on offer now, both in concerts and on recordings than there was in what nostalgists think of as the golden era of classics in America.” (New York Times )
