Could an old antifungal open up a new way to tackle the problem when antidepressant drugs stop working?
The development of tolerance to antidepressant treatment is an important clinical problem affecting about one third of patients treated for depression. This can show up as a loss of clinical effect, for example an antidepressant, which was working becomes less effective. In some cases, patients may develop resistance after a period of time off treatment, failing to respond to an antidepressant which had been effective previously. Until now there has been no satisfactory explanation nor a way to improve treatment of antidepressant intolerance or resistance. Now Nicoletta Sonino, endocrinologist at the Department of Mental Health in Padova working together with Giovanni A. Fava at the University of Bologna in Italy, have described a novel way to tackle the problem. Their work was based on assessing the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in such patients -they found their HPA axis seemed to be overactive. The breakthrough came from using a treatment to bring down the level of stero
