Were You Born to Be Sad?
Test your personality type, see how well you can identify emotions from facial expressions, and evaluate your tendency to take risks, with a series of fun internet-based tests provided at a new depression research website. If you’d like to participate even more, you can sign up as a volunteer and help depression researchers to explore the genetics and brain functions behind depression.
Internet Quizzes About Depression
Research being led by the University of Manchester, and involving 13 different research centres in 10 countries, aims to understand more about the role of genetics and brain function in depression. A series of fun internet tests available at the research group’s new web site, New Mood, will give you a taster of what the research is like, and if you’d like, you can even sign up to become a research participant. Volunteers for the research study will be asked to fill in a confidential questionnaire and provide a mouth swab for genetic analysis; the team will compare the DNA with the questionnaire group data.
Assumptions Motivating the Depression Research
- Depression is a common illness affecting one in five to ten people, at some time in their life and is twice as common in women as in men.
- Treatment can be very effective, but may not help everyone who has depression.
- The causes of depression are a mixture of genetic tendency together with personality factors, difficult circumstances and life experiences. This study hopes to combine all these factors together to provide an overall framework for the treatment of depression.
- A big challenge is trying to understand how these causes work together to lead to depression.
- A key part of this will be how certain genes can lead to depression in some people and not in others. How do social and life factors such as stress and adverse events combine with genes to produce the illness? This is why NewMood is so diverse with animal and human studies working side by side in the attempt to mould a new basis for the research and treatment of depression.
Key Aims of the Depression Research
- To increase the understanding of the mechanisms involved in depression (e.g. better knowledge of brain function in depressed and non-depressed individuals)
- To investigate the links between genes, life events and personality that might be found in depression
- To identify new drugs and new targets for drugs
- To understand why about one third of cases of depression do not respond to current treatments
- To understand the adverse effects of some therapies with certain individuals
- Ultimately to be able to tailor-make drug regimes to suit individual patients on the basis of their genetic profile or individual history.
Background on the Study
From the depression research group’s background page:
NewMood stands for New molecules in Mood disorders. The central aim is to identify which of our 33,000 genes play a role in depression — and we know that many genes may be involved. This knowledge will help us develop new ways of preventing and treating depression.
NewMood is a major collaboration involving 13 research centres in 10 countries, funded by the EU, and organised from the Neuroscience and Psychiatry Unit (NPU) at the University of Manchester. Many of the centres will be working with animal models (mice and rats), along with human clinical studies being carried out in Manchester, Wurzburg , Budapest and Maastrict. For the latter studies, we aim to examine social pressures, previous and current adverse life events, and various aspects of psychology and behaviour, to build up an overall profile of depression, and compare this with DNA analysis results, (and, at a later date, with brain structure and function through Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans).
The aim is to build-up specific profiles associated with depression, and compare these with genotypes in an effort to understand how the genetic basis of depression is expressed. The study will take more than four years to complete.
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This article was last reviewed by on Thursday, 1st September 2005. You can leave a response below.
The URL of this page is:
http://counsellingresource.com/features/2005/09/01/were-you-born-to-be-sad/
21st September 2005
why was i born i have no purpose