Santarelli et al article

Depression is a major problem in our society and most people experience it at some time or another in their lives.  This also means that there is a large market for antidepressants in the pharmaceutical industry.  These drugs in turn cause side effects to their use. One of the effects is an increase in hippocampal neurogenesis.

It is very important to discover the underlying mechanisms through which the effects of antidepressants (ADs) are regulated so that better products can arise as a result of new research. Santarelli et al. state that the behavioral effects of these ADs require neurogenesis in the hippocampus. They conducted a number of interesting and time-consuming experiments to test their hypothesis of neurogenesis contributing to antidepressant effectiveness.  Using NSF, a behavioral anxiety assay, they determined correlation between antidepressant usage and latency in food consumption. Their data allowed them to reach the conclusion that chronic treatment with ADs allowed them to see reduction in latency to feed in a new environment (for mice). Among the ADs, one was a SSRI and other two were tricyclic antidepressants (TCA). They found that a receptor, 5-HT1a is necessary for the correct function of SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) but not for the TCAs, showing possible independent pathway functioning amongst the two types of ADs. They also tested irradiation effects on the hippocampus, which has been reported to lower cell proliferation. They determined that the radiation blocked the effect of AD treatment.

To conclude, the paper itself was a hard read, and used many technically challenging to understand assays and terminology. It was difficult to imagine the underlying test design and to understand the exact meaning of all the data provided, although it was very evident that a tremendous amount of research and statistical calculation was involved in their data derivation.  Santarelli et al.’s paper is also very important as a whole to the field, considering how many citations it has generated after publication, and the amount of controversy surrounding it. The Bessa et al. paper was also a response to some of the claims made by Santarelli, and provided a very nice contrasting view of the research techniques used to gauge the accuracy of the methods, seeing as how methods often determine the accuracy of the presented data in any research setting.