Pittsburgh researchers may have found 'cure' for some untreatable depressionBy Sean D. Hamill / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Aug. 22, 2016
EXCERPTED
Ben Finder remembers when the depression first hit him.
It was three years ago when he was 13, a happy and energetic eighth-grader in Obama Middle School in Pittsburgh.
“The first sign, I noticed that every few days I’d get this feeling that came over me of nothingness,” Ben recalled this past week. “It’s kind of hard to describe, but I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time.”
He did not tell his parents until a few months later, when the feelings of nothingness grew to include thoughts of committing suicide. Those thoughts became overwhelming. The illness would consume his and his parents’ lives over the next year as doctors had Ben try different drugs, different therapies, with several stays in mental health hospitals, all in a search for help that seemed increasingly unlikely to come.
Ben had what they call in the psychiatric field “treatment-refractory depression,” which is simply a way of saying that all the existing therapies did not help him, putting him in a group that is about 15 percent of all people diagnosed with depression. ...
What his father discovered was that two researchers, Lisa Pan, a psychiatrist, and Jerry Vockley, a biochemical geneticist, and their team at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC had found an experimental therapy for patients just like Ben that was showing amazing promise — so much so that it could potentially change the way that people with seemingly untreatable depression, as well as those with other mental illnesses, are treated medically.
As outlined in an article posted online Aug. 11 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Pan, Dr. Vockley and their team discovered that many people like Ben with untreatable depression may have a disorder that can be treated by finding what is missing from their central nervous system metabolism. ...
Beginning in 2014, they evaluated 33 depression patients who were not responding to treatment. Dr. Vockley and Dr. Finegold looked for metabolic disorders with each of them, this time using an even broader series of tests that looks at hundreds of metabolites in the cerebral spinal fluid, to see if the levels differed from that found in their blood tests.
Of the 33 patients, 21 were found to have metabolite abnormalities. Twelve of the 21 had the same abnormality: cerebral folate deficiency, a disorder sometimes found in infants that slows their development but is also associated with a variety of adult medical problems.
Folate is a vitamin found in leafy green vegetables like asparagus and broccoli. But to try to fill the gap in the patients they found, Dr. Pan’s team prescribed pills of high doses of folinic acid to the 12 patients. Ten of the 12 showed improvement at the first follow-up, with most showing reductions in thoughts of suicide not long after treatment began. ...
Full story at Pittsburgh Post-GazetteI'd be depressed about having to attend a school named after that idiot Obama, but that's just me.
