Many people recover quickly from stress, but some develop stressful depression after stressful situations. Scientists have found an explanation for this difference – it turns out that everything depends on the physiology of the brain.
Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute (USA) set out to find out the cause of the difference in people’s responses to stress. They came to the conclusion that clinical depression after stress may be the result of too intense activity of the GPR158 orphan receptor.
As the experts found, receptors are called orphans, for which there are no compounds (ligands) capable of binding to them. Scientists conducted an experiment in mice suffering from chronic stress and found that animals with an excess of GPR158 had a whole series of signs of depression.
“GPR158 affects key signaling pathways associated with mood regulation in the brain area called the prefrontal cortex,” the authors of the project noted.
According to them, in animals in which GPR158 activity was suppressed, not only depression did not develop, their stress resistance was generally the highest. Scientists believe that things can be the same for people.
This finding will help develop a drug for the treatment of depression, the effect of which will be based on suppression of the GPR158 receptor.