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Symptoms of depression show little change during the development and progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study. Researchers at Rush University Medical Center tracked symptoms of depression during the transition from no cognitive impairment to dementia and found that depression is a risk factor and not an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease.

"Our study suggests that depression is truly a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease," said lead author Dr. Robert S. Wilson. "If depression was an early sign of the disease, we would expect to see it increase prior to diagnosis and as the disease progresses. Our study found very little change.

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My daughter Rachel is sitting silently ten feet away from me, stroking our cat. It's a hot summer day and nearby her siblings are all splashing in our new pool. Why isn't my 11-year-old with them? Because she suffers from clinical depression, and she isn't having one of her better days.

I first noticed Rachel's symptoms when she was 6. She started clinging to me more than usual, crying at the smallest provocation, eating less, and having nightmares. She seemed anxious. After several weeks, the situation seemed to resolve on its own, but, having been through depression several times myself, I was on the watch for other signs.

Symptoms showed up again two years later, at the end of a long winter. Rachel, by then a third-grader, started telling me that everybody picked on her (though this didn't actually seem true), and that she wished she had never been born. That last, increasingly frequent comment scared me, but I decided to give her a few weeks to see if it would pass.

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 We all have our Anxiety Closets, filled with fears: global nuclear warfare, raging inflation, clowns. Lately, another fear has arisen: depression. We're not talking about the psychologically crippling condition, but the economically crippling one. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has been the most recent economist to sound a warning about the possibility of a depression.

Could we have a depression? Well, sure. What should you do about it? It depends on how worried you are Depressions are, technically, extremely severe business contractions. Before the Great Depression, all business downturns were called depressions. Economists started using the term "recession" after the Great Depression, because they didn't want to terrify the public, already scarred from the Big One.

The hallmarks of a depression are abnormally high unemployment, numerous bank failures and massive bankruptcies. The term "depression" also carries the connotation of deflation — that is, a sharp decline in prices. Certainly, housing and stock prices have been marked down sharply in the past two years.

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Scientists have discovered a possible explanation for the symptoms of anxiety and depression that occur in some patients taking the popular statin family of anti-cholesterol drugs. These symptoms could result from long-term, low levels of cholesterol in the brain, the report suggests. It is an already known fact that the anti-cholesterol drugs increase the risk of anxiety and depression, but till now, the reasons were unclear.

Amitabha Chattopadhyay and colleagues showed using lab tests, that long-term use of the drug caused significant changes in the structure and function of serotonin cell receptors. Serotonin is a brain hormone that influences mood and behavior. Adding cholesterol to cells treated with mevastatin restored them to normal.

The results represent the first report describing the effect of long-term cholesterol depletion on this type of cell receptor and suggest that chronic, low cholesterol levels in the brain might trigger anxiety and depression, the scientists say.

According to one of the largest combined studies of its kind in Australia, conducted in collaboration with the University of New England and Bond University and released yesterday, found all patients had some level of mood alteration following a cancer diagnosis, but for one in five patients it progressed to serious depression. The research tracked more than 1000 patients who had undergone radiation therapy over the past decade and compared their emotional experiences with the support provided by their GPs.

Michelle Baker, 49, is in remission for secondary breast cancer in her lungs, ribs and spine, but is still battling depression developed after her diagnosis in 2006. The mother of two, whose sister and father died as a result of cancer, first encountered the disease with a primary breast cancer diagnosis in 1991.

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A new study has revealed that the strain of genetically defective mice is a useful animal model for laboratory studies that could be useful for understanding human depression.A unique strain of laboratory mice could have behavioural, hormonal, and neurochemical characteristics that are similar to those of human patients with drug-resistant forms of depression.

"A mouse can't tell us if it is feeling depressed, so we used a number of different kinds of tests-including some new ones that we developed-to gauge behavioral and hormonal changes, or phenotypes, of a type of depression that, in humans, does not respond well to some antidepressant drugs," said Bernhard Luscher, professor of biology at Penn State.

"These indicators include reduced exploration of novel or otherwise aversive environments, failure to escape from a highly stressful situation, and reduced pleasure-seeking behavior such as a reduced preference for sweet over plain water," he added.

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Radiation oncologist David Christie collaborated with the University of New England and Bond University to research the link between cancer and mental illness in 1,000 patients across south-east Queensland. Dr Christie says every patient feels a change in their mood following a cancer diagnosis but for a fifth of patients, he says these feelings will progress to serious depression.

"A relatively high proportion of patients reached the normal criteria for considering that a patient has either depression or anxiety," he said. "[It is] something more than the natural feeling of bad news that one would get when you receive a diagnosis of cancer or have to undergo cancer treatment, but to actually have that to lead to an illness or a disorder where it might affect you in other ways."

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Nearly three quarters of new mums feel down shortly after birth, complaining of sadness, mood swings, anxiety and loss of appetite. In around one in ten new mothers this continues and is classed as post-natal depression. A sharp drop in oestrogen levels after birth has now been found to coincide with the release of an enzyme in the brain which blocks 'feel-good' chemicals.

Previous research has shown that in the first three to four days after giving birth, oestrogen levels drop by up to 1000 fold. And the new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows that in proportion to this oestrogen loss, levels of an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A increase dramatically in the brain.

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‘It's all in your head” isn't something a chronically depressed person likes to hear. In the age of Prozac, when adjusting your serotonin level is as normal as checking the oil in your car, it seems unhelpful to suggest that someone might think their way into – or out of – a disease of the mind.

And yet depression is all in our heads. Where else would it be? The real question, still hotly debated in the scientific community, is whether its cause is chemical and ultimately curable (good news for Big Pharma) or something far more complex (good news for poets and pot-smoking students of existential philosophy).

There is no doubt that depression exists. Inexplicable sadness – or “melancholia,” as it was historically known – has been with us since Hippocrates conceived his famous oath. But a groundbreaking new study has found that not only is depression affected by the way we think about it, so too is its cure.

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The study raises the possibility that depression causes people to put on extra pounds around the belly. The opposite doesn't appear to be the case: researchers found that overweight people aren't more likely to become depressed than their normal-weight peers.

These findings come from researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who examined data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (CARDIA), a 20-year longitudinal study of more than 5,100 men and women aged 18-30. (Longitudinal studies look for a link between cause and effect by observing a group of individuals at regular intervals over a long period of time). Among other things, the researchers wanted to figure out if depressed people were more likely to have larger waist circumferences and a higher BMI, and how that changed over time.

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