Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression is a biologically plausible, multi-level theory that describes neural, physiologic, molecular, and genomic mechanisms that link experiences of social-environmental adversity with internal biological processes that drive depression pathogenesis, maintenance, and recurrence. Central to this theory is the hypothesis that interpersonal stressors involving social threat (e.g., social conflict, evaluation, rejection, isolation, and exclusion) upregulate inflammatory processes that can induce several depressive symptoms, including sad mood, anhedonia, fatigue, psychomotor retardation, and social-behavioral withdrawal. The original article describing this formulation (Psychol Bull 140:774-815, 2014) addressed critical questions involving depression onset and recurrence, as well as why depression is strongly predicted by early life stress and comorbid with anxiety disorders and certain physical disease conditions, such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic pain, and cardiovascular disease. Here, we extend the theory to help explain sex differences in depression prevalence, which is a defining feature of this disorder. Central to this extension is research demonstrating that ovarian hormone fluctuations modulate women's susceptibility to stress, brain structure and function, and inflammatory activity and reactivity. These effects are evident at multiple levels and are highly context-dependent, varying as a function of several factors including sex, age, reproductive state, endogenous versus exogenous hormones, and hormone administration mode and dose. Together, these effects help explain why women are at greater risk for developing inflammation-related depressed mood and other neuropsychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative disorders during the reproductive years, especially for those already at heightened risk for depression or in the midst of a hormonal transition period.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00213-019-05326-9 | DOI Listing |
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2025
Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3SZ, United Kingdom.
Experiments have shown that when one plant is attacked by a pathogen or herbivore, this can lead to other plants connected to the same mycorrhizal network up-regulating their defense mechanisms. It has been hypothesized that this represents signaling, with attacked plants producing a signal to warn other plants of impending harm. We examined the evolutionary plausibility of this and other hypotheses theoretically.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAddict Biol
January 2025
Department of Neurosurgery, The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China.
Morphine dependence or addiction is a serious global public health and social problem, and traditional treatments are very limited. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has emerged as a new potential treatment for drug addiction. Repeated use of morphine leads to neuroadaptive and molecular changes in the addiction-related brain regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
January 2025
Youth Resilience Unit, Academic Unit, Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health, Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
Background: Understanding resilience factors in children is essential for developing early mental health interventions. Middle childhood is an understudied developmental stage, with many quantitative measures lacking validation for this age group and not capturing diverse experiences. This study aimed to use body mapping, an arts-based method, as a novel approach to understand 7-10-year-old children's concepts of resilience (including definitions and factors that contribute to resilience) in East London.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEJNMMI Phys
January 2025
QIMP Team, Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Aim: The combination of positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides an innovation leap in the use of fertilized chicken eggs (in ovo model) in preclinical imaging as PET/MRI enables the investigation of the chick embryonal organ-specific distribution of PET-tracers. However, hybrid PET/MRI inheres technical challenges in quantitative in ovo PET such as attenuation correction (AC) for the object as well as for additional hardware parts present in the PET field-of-view, which potentially contribute to quantification biases in the PET images if not accounted for. This study aimed to investigate the influence of the different sources of attenuation on in ovo PET/MRI and assess the accuracy of MR-based AC for in ovo experiments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain Behav
January 2025
Department of Neurology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Multi-Omics Research Center for Brain Disorders, Hengyang Medical School, University Of South China, Hengyang, Hunan, China.
Background And Purpose: Cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) is recognized as a major contributor to progressive cognitive decline and cerebral hemorrhages in the elderly population. Currently, there is a global shortage of safe and effective treatments for this condition. Bisdemethoxycurcumin (BDMC) has been demonstrated to exhibit pharmacological effects with anti-Aβ toxicity properties.
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