A recent “umbrella” study of accumulated data strongly suggests no correlation exists between depression and low serotonin levels.
“We don’t know how the medications actually work in the brain…. I’ll often say something like the way Zoloft works, is, it increases the level of serotonin in your brain (or synapses, neurons) and, presumably, the reason you’re depressed or anxious is that you have some sort of a deficiency. And I say that [chuckles] not because I really believe it, because I know the evidence really isn’t there for us to understand the mechanism—I think I say that because patients want to know something. And they want to know that we as physicians have some basic understanding of what we’re doing when we’re prescribing medications. They certainly don’t want to know that a psychiatrist essentially has no idea how these medications work.”
The pharmaceutical industry has been prescribing antidepressants based on this fallacious argument for decades. I had decided years ago that doctors and manufacturers had little to no idea what these drugs really do.
Here’s your macroeconomic tie-in. As the world continues down the road to resource depletion, and the average person must learn to live with less, the market for frivolous psychoactive drugs will diminish in lieu of necessary goods and services. I’m sure antidepressants help some people feel better, but I believe this new study that shows that depression and serotonin level do not correlate.
I know a few people who say they benefit from them, but I also believe they create a dependency on the serotonin boost, one that can be difficult to overcome.
The pharmaceutical industry has been prescribing antidepressants based on this fallacious argument for decades. I had decided years ago that doctors and manufacturers had little to no idea what these drugs really do.
Doctors and scientists have little idea how general anesthesia works but you will be hard pressed to have surgery without it.
Psychiatry is not a “hard science” medical field like cardiology or nephrology, there is a lot about the human brain/mind we still don’t understand. Maybe this new study debunks serotonin levels as a marker, maybe it is something else, but antidepressants do work. The problem is, too many people want a quick fix answer in a pill especially for short term problems.
FWIW, one summer in medical school I worked in R&D for a pharmaceutical company for a physician studying antidepressants. Everything was still trying to beat an old “gold standard” drug (nortriptyline, IRRC) but essentially just dancing around lessening the side effects but not improving on outcome. One interesting side road, many of the new drugs showed significant weight loss in patients and were later promoted as weight loss drugs instead of antidepressants.
A recent “umbrella” study of accumulated data strongly suggests no correlation exists between depression and low serotonin levels.
In another area of brain research…
Most cited and most notorious: how the 2006 Alzheimer’s paper potentially misled research www.biotechniques.com/neuroscience/most-cited-and-most-notor…
Data included in a pivotal Alzheimer’s study from 2006 may have been fabricated, potentially misleading research for the last 16 years. Physician and neuroscientist Matthew Schrag raised concern about the validity of a research paper published in 2006 regarding the primary role of amyloid-beta (Aß) plaques in causing the neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer’s…
During his technical and medical inspection of the drug’s scientific standing, he combed through a pivotal study from 2006 that detailed the discovery of an Aß subtype that caused dementia in rats. One of the most cited studies about Alzheimer’s disease, this paper published in Nature by first author Sylvain Lesne was found to contain apparently fabricated data and tampered images…
Science launched its own 6-month investigation into the matter, conferring with experts in image analysis and Alzheimer’s. They agreed with Schrag’s conclusions that Lesné’s paper had likely reported false results. Molecular biologist and forensic image consultant, Elisabeth Bik, commented that the authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments. The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to… better fit a hypothesis.”
I saw this about a week ago and almost started a thread about it.
Aside from the fabrication itself it means a tremendous amount of research time and resources. There has also been a lot of wasted research on breast cancer.
https://iowaclimate.org/2020/12/02/roger-pielke-jr-the-unsto…
A 2015 literature review found almost 900 peer-reviewed studies published on breast cancer using a cell line derived from a breast cancer patient in Texas in 1976. But in 2007 it was confirmed that the cell line that had long been the focus of this research was actually not a breast cancer line, but was instead a skin cancer line. Whoops.
Even worse, from 2008 to 2014 — after the mistaken cell line was conclusively identified — the review identified 247 peer-reviewed articles putatively on breast cancer that were published using the misidentified skin cancer cell line. A cursory search of Google Scholar indicates that studies continue to be published in 2020 mistakenly using the skin cell line in breast cancer research.
Part of the problem is the lack of coordination of research, as each researcher follows their own (frequently redundant) path, a huge amount of time, effort and money are being wasted.
"I’m sure antidepressants help some people feel better, but I believe this new study that shows that depression and serotonin level do not correlate.
I think/believe that if one has severe depression, they help. Quite a bit in some cases.
If one is mildly depressed, no better than placebo."
Remember that statistics is a method to prove and disprove all hypotheses - frequently using
the same data.
Howie52
The concept that all individuals can be “modeled” by looking at any statistical study is
absurd. Anyone looking for “causation” is doomed to failure should they use statistics.
However, statistics is an excellent tool to evaluate the ability of a drug to impact
a group of patients - as long as the impact is not expected to be “universal”. Statistics
always has “outliers” - and studies frequently succeed or fail based on how the study
decides how to handle “outliers”.
Using a statistical study to find a cause is much akin to using a hammer to tighten a screw.
The point of contention is the claim that depression is caused by low serotonin levels, which has been used to justify the use of SSRI medicines for several decades. The study indicates that there is little or no correlation between depression and low serotonin levels.
The point of contention is the claim that depression is caused by low serotonin levels, which has been used to justify the use of SSRI medicines
the efficacy of SSRI medications was not addressed in the research you are alluding to…
the consensus among depression researchers for sometime is that low serotonin is not the sole cause of depression.
efficacy data from clinical trials with SSRIs and not the serotonin hypothesis is the evidence based criterion that physicians practice.
This review paper was not designed to probe the psychopharmacological mechanisms of antidepressants, nor their efficacy the authors stated.