Author: Justin Mckibben
Sadness is a part of life, and every once in a while we all experience the slump that comes with a bad case of the blues. Our troubles are often what make our joys more special, but depression is a much more serious side of sadness that can be debilitating and even lethal. Far too many people suffer from depression that goes on untreated until they resort to implosive behaviors such as substance abuse, self-harm or even suicide. Suicide claims a life every 14 minutes in the U.S., and the situation is only getting worse. That means in the time it takes me to write this article, edit and post it, more than a dozen men and women will have taken their own lives. I had to let that sink in for a second… The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has tallied up more than 41,000 people who die by suicide each year in the United States. Suicide is actually the second-leading cause of death in people aged 15 to 34 years. Over 90% of the people who take their lives suffer from some form of mental illness. Primarily the most common factor is depression. Depression and Gender Differences Women and men experience many things differently, for reasons both biological and environmental, so it is no surprise serious depression affects men and women differently. Now a new study is saying there are numerous genes regulating the activity of a neurotransmitter in the brain which have been found to be abundant in brain tissue of depressed females, suggesting a genetic diversity between men and women with depression. According to the research conducted at the University of Illinois at Chicago this new discovery could be one of the underlying causes of the higher frequency of suicides among women, giving experts new information to change what we know about depression treatment. Gender to Glutamate If we are going to talk gender in terms of depression and suicide, statistically we should note:- Women are 2 to 3 times more likely to attempt suicide
- Men are 4 times more likely to actually die by suicide
The risk of suicide is associated with changes in several neurotransmitter systems.
Monsheel Sodhi, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at UIC, studied the autopsy tissue from brains of psychiatric patients who had passed away. Sodhi noted that female patients with depression had abnormally high expression levels of many genes that regulate the glutamate system. Glutamate is the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, and the glutamate system is widely distributed in the brain. Many abnormalities in this part of the brain have been linked to several other issues, including:- Schizophrenia
- Epilepsy
- Autism
- Alzheimer's disease
- Dopamine
- Serotonin
- Norepinephrine
- New glutamate receptor targets for development of treatments for depression
- Identifiers of biochemical markers that could be used to assess suicide risk
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