Bessa et al review

     My response will be mainly concerning Bessa et al. I chose to read Santarelli et al. first which definitely was the right choice, seeing as Bessa et al. was a somewhat response paper to that. The first sentence made it clear that they were not trying to necessarily disprove Sanarelli’s claim that antidepressants work by inducing neurogenesis but to suggest that the two (neurogenesis and positive antidepressant behavior) are “not necessarily mutually exclusive” which I felt was not an easy task to research. The paper went through an exhaustive, and honestly perhaps superfluous results section, which I think, could have been organized in a clearer format. I found myself reading the same sentences multiple times but in different places throughout the paper and wondering “is this really the best way to show this information”? Although I found that the amount of research that went into the paper was substantial, I was consistently distracted by how poorly it was organized. I found that the use of MAM was really well used, but, and maybe this is just because I haven’t read hundreds of these papers, that more diagrams comparing the MAM to their controls may have been helpful. A side by side comparison chart of MAM vs. no MAM would have made things easier to comprehend. 

     The discussion section helped bring me back to the point of the paper, being that the neurogenesis may be, to quote them, an “epiphenomenon”, and the use of MAM clearly shows that even without neurogenesis, the animals being treated with CMS and antidepressants still showed positive effects. I found that the idea that neurogenesis may not be the reason why the AD’s work was daring, especially since to the layperson, Santarelli’s group seemed to have sufficient evidence but to Bessa this was an opportunity to prove otherwise. After looking into Bessa’s previous work it was clear that they are extremely knowledgeable in the plasticity aspect of depression as well as comparisons to neurogenesis as well, which leads me to believe that Bessa may have almost scoffed at the idea that Santarelli’s group was satisfied with their findings which now almost look incomplete. What I appreciate and find in a lot of well done research is that they focus a section of the paper on ruling out every other possibility and why what they’ve found is the most probable; Bessa et al. seemed to me to be that “section” on its own. So, as much as I was not a fan of the actual formatting of the paper, I found that it was very thorough and in my eyes, a stronger paper than Santarelli et al.