Being stressed can make you anxious. And vice versa. And the combination of stress and anxiety can lead to depression, according to Canadian researchers, who have recently discovered how anxiety and stress and depression can all become intertwined ... leaving a pretty unhappy person!
Stephen Ferguson of Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario and colleagues identified the connecting mechanism in the brain and how abnormal brain signaling might occur.
The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, showed how one brain receptor that leads to anxiety in response to stress and how specific types of serotonin receptors lead to depression might connect in the brain.
"Our findings suggest there may be an entire new generation of drugs and drug targets that can be used to selectively target depression and therefore treat it more effectively," Ferguson said in a statement. "We've gone from mechanism to mouse, and the next step is to see whether or not we can take the inhibitor we developed, and turn it into a pharmaceutical agent."
