According to researchers from the National Institutes of Health report that scopolamine appears to produce replicable rapid improvement in mood. This medication temporarily blocks the muscarinic cholinergic receptor, which is suspected to be overactive in those individuals suffering from depression.

Drs. Wayne Drevets and Maura Furey recruited outpatients with major depressive disorders in order to conduct their study. These participants were randomly assigned to receive placebos and then scopolamine treatment, or vice versa, in a double-blinded design. Such a method ensures that neither the researchers nor the patients knew which treatment they were receiving.

"Scopolamine was found to reduce symptoms of depression within three days of the first administration. In fact, participants reported that they experienced relief from their symptoms by the morning after the first administration of drug," explained Dr. Furey, in the Science Daily.

"Moreover, one-half of participants experienced full symptom remission by the end of the treatment period. Finally, participants remained well during a subsequent placebo period, indicating that the antidepressant effects persist for at least two weeks in the absence of further treatment."

This finding is interesting as the blocking of muscarinic receptors was a property of the oldest type of antidepressants: tricyclic antidepressants. The receptor blocking was mainly viewed as the cause of unwanted side effects and newer medications are designed to avoid blocking muscarinic receptors.

Current data suggests that recent strategies have actually increased the safety and tolerability of these medications while sacrificing the provision of effective and timely relief for depression symptoms.
 

Science Daily recently posted a release that examined a study by researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London. This study indicates that depression is as much of a risk factor for mortality as smoking.

Researchers used a unique link between a survey of more than 60,000 people and a comprehensive mortality database to find that over the four years following the survey, the mortality risk was increased to a similar extent in people who were depressed as in people who were smokers.

Dr Robert Stewart, who led the research team at the IoP, noted, “Unlike smoking, we don’t know how causal the association with depression is but it does suggest that more attention should be paid to this link because the association persisted after adjusting for many other factors.”

The study also highlighted that patients with depression face an overall increased risk of mortality. At the same time, a combination of depression and anxiety in patients actually lowers mortality compared with depression alone; suggesting that maybe a little anxiety is actually good for you.

Dr Stewart commented: “It would certainly not surprise me at all to find that doctors are less likely to investigate physical symptoms in people with depression because they think that depression is the explanation, but may be more likely to investigate if someone is anxious because they think it will reassure them. These are conjectures but they would fit with the data.”