Depression is a serious medical illness that involves the brain. It's more than just a feeling of being "down in the dumps" or "blue" for a few days. If you are one of the more than 20 million people in the United States who have depression, the feelings do not go away. They persist and interfere with your everyday life.
Kevin Garey, professor of pharmacy practice and translational research at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy is reporting the first well-controlled study to demonstrate that a microbiome therapeutic, SER-109, is associated with significant quality of life improvement in patients with the debilitating recurrent infection and disease caused by Clostridium difficile (or C. diff).
Regular deep meditation, practised for several years, may help to regulate the gut microbiome and potentially lower the risks of physical and mental ill health, finds a small comparative study published in the open access journal General Psychiatry.
Using samples from an almost century-old, ongoing survey of marine plankton, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine suggest that rising levels of manmade chemicals found in parts of the world's oceans might be used to monitor the impact of human activity on ecosystem health, and may one day be used to study the connections between ocean pollution and land-based rates of childhood and adult chronic illnesses.
BioVU, Vanderbilt University Medical Center's biobank, has reached another milestone -; deep-freeze storage of more than 300,000 biological samples.
A team of Duke researchers has identified a group of human DNA sequences driving changes in brain development, digestion and immunity that seem to have evolved rapidly after our family line split from that of the chimpanzees, but before we split with the Neanderthals.
Each individual has a unique chemical fingerprint. Small molecules in the blood, like fats or sugars, have a significant impact on how the human body responds to stress, which diseases people are predisposed to, and how serious an illness will be.
New research from King's College London has found that seeing or hearing birds is associated with an improvement in mental wellbeing that can last up to eight hours.
Strict parenting can influence how the body reads the children’s DNA. These modifications can become “hard-wired” into the DNA of kids who consider their parents to be harsh, enhancing their biological risk for depression in adolescence and later life.
Researchers led by Rahel Marti at the University of Basel in Switzerland report that viewing, feeling, and touching real dogs leads to increasingly higher levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.
The Tob gene is well known for its connection to cancer. Scientists have discovered that this gene also has a significant role in lowering depression, fear, and anxiety in a multidisciplinary study that blends molecular biology with neuroscience.
According to a recent viewpoint piece in Science by a UT Southwestern researcher, there is growing evidence that the microbes found in the human stomach might also affect a person’s neurological and emotional health.
It can be crippling for those who suffer from conditions like depression, anxiety, and cluster headaches. In clinical research, psychedelic substances have demonstrated benefits as therapies for several ailments, but not in all cases.
Many longtime gardeners will tell you that the garden is their happy place. New research suggests that many people may indeed reap mental health benefits from working with plants -; even if they've never gardened before.
Depression is a common mental health condition that affects approximately 1 million Australians each year. It is a significant risk factor for suicide, the leading cause of death in young adults.
Polygenic risk scores (PRS) are promising tools for forecasting disease risk, but current versions have bias built-in, which can reduce their accuracy in some populations and lead to health disparities.
For World Creativity and Innovation Day, we asked leading experts within the life sciences industry 'What does creativity and innovation look like to you within science?'.
Jerry Guintivano, PhD, of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, led an exclusive transcriptome-wide association research that showed substantial changes in B-cells in women with postpartum depression, with pathway observations indicating modified B-cell activation and insulin resistance.
For the first time, a study conducted by the TU Dresden and the University of Zurich in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light finds a relationship between depressive disorders and mechanical features of all main blood cell types.
Researchers from a USC-led consortium have discovered 15 "hotspots" in the genome that either speed up brain aging or slow it down -; a finding that could provide new drug targets to resist Alzheimer's disease and other degenerative brain disorders, as well as developmental delays.
It is well known that long-term exposure to stress can lead to serious psychiatric problems. However, the precise mechanisms underpinning the stress response have remained largely elusive.