Biological Prediction of Suicidal Behavior in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder

Neurobiology of Major Depressive Disorder

“…Expressions of BDNF, BDNF-regulated genes, and the receptor TrkB are decreased in postmortem brain samples from depressed humans [25] and in circulating lymphocytes of depressed patients during a drug-free period [26]. Consistent with these findings, serum levels of BDNF are also decreased in MDD patients [27, 28] and polymorphisms in the BDNF gene may be predictive of the chronicity of the disease [29]. Moreover, expression of BDNF is upregulated both in human and experimental animals by antidepressant treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation [30–34].…”

“…As mentioned above, a characteristic feature observed in MDD patients is the elevation of glucocorticoids. However, in spite of the potent anti-inflammatory effect of glucocorticoids, MDD patients exhibit elevated levels of circulating proinflammatory cytokines, including interleukin-1, interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor alpha, and some soluble interleukin receptors [28, 65–67]. The proinflammatory cytokines not only participate in the innate immune response and inflammation but also have important metabolic and endocrine effects including neurotransmitter metabolism, neuroendocrine function, and neural plasticity.…”

Are Low Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor Levels in the Blood a Biological Marker of Suicide Risk in Psychiatric Patients? A Systematic Review

“…Carrying on the studies of biological markers in major depression and suicidal behaviour, some candidate markers for suicide were explored [57]. A variety of cytokines, neurotrophins and nitric oxide (NO) levels were examined about their possible correlation with the severity of depression and the lethality of suicide attempts among suicidal MDD patients and normal controls [57].…”

“…Carrying on the studies of biological markers in major depression and suicidal behaviour, some candidate markers for suicide were explored [57]. A variety of cytokines, neurotrophins and nitric oxide (NO) levels were examined about their possible correlation with the severity of depression and the lethality of suicide attempts among suicidal MDD patients and normal controls [57]. The study measured the lethality of previous suicidal acts (Weisman and Worden's RRR system and LSARS-II scale), Body Mass Index (BMI), and the severity of depression (using the 17-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, HDRS).…”

Retinoic acid triazole promotes neurotrophin-mediated cell growth and proliferation in nerve cells

“…The postmortem brain samples from depressed humans (Tripp et al, 2012) and lymphocytes of depressed patientswere found to be deficient of brain -derived neurotrophic factor, brain-derived neurotrophic factor-regulated genes, and the receptor TrkB (Pandey et al, 2010). The brain-derived neurotrophic factor was found to be deficient in serum of MDD patients (Karege et al, 2002;Kim et al, 2007) and the extent of its polymorphism indicated chronicity level of the disease (Lee et al, 2013). The antidepressant treatments including electroconvulsive therapy and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation enhanced the expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (Chen et al, 2001;Altar et al, 2003;M¨uller et al, 2000M¨uller et al, , Gonul et al, 2005Lang et al, 2006) and produced antidepressant effect on behavioral models of depression (Siuciak et al, 1996;Shirayama et al, 2002) deficient of TrkB receptor (Saarelainen et al, 2003).…”