sion.” Several different aspects of the system should be targeted “to effectively treat both the cognitive and emotional symptoms that are associated with depression,” they add.
More recently it has been confirmed that, as Dr. Lindskog suspected, astrocytes are of major importance in depression. Dr. Boldizsar Czeh of the Max-Planck-Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany, and colleagues took a further look at astrocytes.
They report that astrocytes “are regarded as the most abundant cell type in the brain,” but it seems they also regulate synapses, that is, the area that allows communication between neurons. They appear to control neuron development in the hippocampus.
In the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, the team sums up all the evidence that antidepressant drugs affect astrocytes. “We propose here a hypothesis that antidepressant treatment activates astrocytes, triggering the reactivation of cortical plasticity.”
They believe that these astrocyte-specific changes probably contribute to the effectiveness of currently available antidepressant drugs, but they add that “better understanding of these cellular and molecular processes could help us to identify novel targets for the development of antidepressant drugs.”