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  1. #1
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    Men & Women Experience Depression Differently: New article

    Article that I found on Neuroscience News:

    Summary: Exposing depressed adolescents to positive and negative words elicited different effects in specific brain regions depending on the sex of the subject, a new Frontiers in Psychiatry study reports.

    Source: Frontiers.

    New findings suggest that adolescent girls and boys might experience depression differently and that sex-specific treatments could be beneficial for adolescents.

    When researchers in the UK exposed depressed adolescents to happy or sad words and imaged their brains, they found that depression has different effects on the brain activity of male and female patients in certain brain regions. The findings suggest that adolescent girls and boys might experience depression differently and that sex-specific treatments could be beneficial for adolescents.

    Men and women appear to suffer from depression differently, and this is particularly striking in adolescents. By 15 years of age, girls are twice as likely to suffer from depression as boys. There are various possible reasons for this, including body image issues, hormonal fluctuations and genetic factors, where girls are more at risk of inheriting depression. However, differences between the sexes don’t just involve the risk of experiencing depression, but also how the disorder manifests and its consequences.

    “Men are more liable to suffer from persistent depression, whereas in women depression tends to be more episodic,” explains Jie-Yu Chuang, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, and an author on the study, which was recently published in Frontiers in Psychiatry. “Compared with women, depressed men are also more likely to suffer serious consequences from their depression, such as substance abuse and suicide.” Despite this, so far, most researchers have focused on depression in women, likely because it is more common.

    This motivated Chuang and her colleagues to carry out this latest study to find differences between depressed men and women. They recruited adolescent volunteers for the study, who were aged between 11 and 18 years. This included 82 female and 24 male patients who suffered from depression, and 24 female and 10 male healthy volunteers. The researchers imaged the adolescents’ brains using magnetic resonance imaging, while flashing happy, sad or neutral words on a screen in a specific order.

    The volunteers pressed a button when certain types of words appeared and did not press the button when others appeared, and the researchers measured their brain activity throughout the experiment. When the researchers flashed certain combinations of words on the screen, they noticed that depression affects brain activity differently between boys and girls in brain regions such as the supramarginal gyrus and posterior cingulate.

    So, what do these results mean? “Our finding suggests that early in adolescence, depression might affect the brain differently between boys and girls,” explains Chuang. “Sex-specific treatment and prevention strategies for depression should be considered early in adolescence. Hopefully, these early interventions could alter the disease trajectory before things get worse.”

    The brain regions highlighted in the study have been previously linked to depression, but further work is needed to understand why they are affected differently in depressed boys, and if this is related to how boys experience and handle depression.

    Because depression is more common in girls, the researchers were not able to recruit as many boys in this study, and future experiments should compare similar numbers of girls and boys for more representative results. Chuang and her colleagues would like to explore this phenomenon further. “I think it would be great to conduct a large longitudinal study addressing sex differences in depression from adolescence to adulthood.”

  2. #2
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    What an epidemic

  3. #3
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    Bump. Great article.

    I personally know of 4 people off the top of my head who have committed suicide in the last few years and 3 were male, 1 female. My brother isn't one of them as I don't consider his death as a suicide - he overdosed on heroin and benzos in 2014. So he's included in the "substance abuse" side (and so am I).
    "You're the worst thing that ever happened to me." --Marla Singer

  4. #4
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    I don't buy into it myself. Falls into the category of gernderizing and drama. Far better to focus on what actually works. People in general are exposed to far more worse things than negative words on a daily basis and most of that negativity is marketed by the research teams that make all these claims. You can't measure suffering on the basis of who actually pulled the trigger because everyone feeling the squeeze is as predisposed to the research finding they want you to beleive as the guy that actually jumped off the cliff. Matters little if you male or female or black or white, not the way the system currently is.
    "...the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation" ~ Terrance McKenna → https://pondermovedhere.blogspot.com/

  5. #5
    The prevalence of major depression is about twice higher in women than in men.This results in part from biological reasons, such as hormones and genes that get disrupted when brain regions are developing in the female fetus. These biological changes during fetal development lay the groundwork that creates a vulnerability to mood disorders.

  6. #6
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    Like there is nothing else in life that adds to the mix hey?

    I think this topic sells a lot of books; but does little else.

    Depression cares little what sex you are.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Ponder View Post
    Like there is nothing else in life that adds to the mix hey?

    I think this topic sells a lot of books; but does little else.

    Depression cares little what sex you are.
    I absolutely agree. And at the same time this is what the research says.

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by MrsMargo View Post
    I absolutely agree. And at the same time this is what the research says.
    So do I.................
    Research is always paid by someone, mostly by pharma
    ''“If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”
    ''
    ― Rabindranath Tagore

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by MrsMargo View Post
    I absolutely agree. And at the same time this is what the research says.
    Yea Srry Margo - I don't know how to read any of these so called studies these days. Forgive my pessimism. I'm just at that stage were I feel it's a complete waste of time reading any of them. Glad there is one that highlights this fact.

  10. #10
    Never mind.

 

 

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