A team of researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (USA) has claimed to have made an important discovery in the field of finding new ways to treat the disease of depression .
The finding is neither more nor less than a very important mechanism by which ghrelin, a natural antidepressant hormone (which acts on both stress and appetite), works within the brain .
To arrive at this discovery, the researchers analyzed this hormone in laboratory mice . Although ghrelin is better known as the “hunger hormone ” for its ability to awaken the appetite, experts discovered that this hormone also had natural antidepressant properties that were manifested by increasing levels of the hormone, basically after a prolonged psychological stress or caloric restriction. In the same way, they found that ghrelin could also cause the formation of new neurons in the hippocampus, which is known as neurogenesis , thus reducing stress levels. Thus, after exposing the mice to prolonged stress, the researchers found that the levels of this hormone increased considerably.
To verify the effectiveness of this hormonal mechanism, they prepared a drug compound called P7C3 that, after injecting it into the mice, determined that they improved the neurogenesis process of ghrelin , making its effect a fairly strong antidepressant.
“By investigating how the hunger hormone worked to limit the spread of depression after long exposure to stress, we discovered what could become a very potent new class of antidepressant drug ,” says Jeffrey Zigman , study leader.
The conclusions of the work, which have been published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry , will help to create better treatments for people with chronic stress, resistance to ghrelin or altered levels of this hormone, the latter related to eating disorders such as obesity or anorexia nervosa.
