Fatty fish can help during depression treatment

Depression often affects not only the person himself, but also the people around him. Treatment of this psychological disorder is not simple, since almost half of the patients do not respond to antidepressants. But scientists from Denmark have developed a method for increasing the effectiveness of antidepressant therapy. As it turns out, patients simply need to include more fatty fish in their diet. As the researchers explain, they tried to find the biological characteristics of the body due to which there is no response to antidepressants, and were able to discover the dependence of fatty acid metabolism in the body and the regulation of the hormonal response to stress.

As a result of the research, specialists were able to establish that in depressive disorders, the metabolism of fatty acids in the body changes under the influence of hormones.

The effect of eating fatty fish during depression was tested on seventy volunteers. The specialists included 51 people in the control group. All participants had their cortisol (stress hormone) and fatty acid levels checked. The scientists also recorded the participants' diet. After preliminary analyses, the scientists gave patients an initial course of antidepressants (6 weeks), which was increased if necessary. As a result, it turned out that those patients who did not respond to treatment had impaired fatty acid metabolism in their bodies.

Next, all participants were divided into several groups, depending on the amount of fatty fish consumed. The people who responded least to the treatment were those whose diet included little fatty fish. In the group where fish was consumed once or twice a week, the effectiveness of antidepressant treatment was 75%. In the group where patients did not consume fish at all, the effect of therapy was observed in only 23% of cases. In the near future, specialists intend to determine the connection between products and the effectiveness of therapy for other diseases.

According to a new study at one of the universities in the United States of America, depressive disorders, problems with sleep, concentration have been diagnosed several times more often in recent decades. Having analyzed health data of about 7 million people (in particular teenagers) and compared them with data from the 80s, experts found that modern teenagers suffer from memory problems almost 40% more often, with sleep by 74%, and twice as many seek help from psychologists. Of all the students surveyed, almost half felt depressed, adult participants in the study more often expressed complaints of poor sleep, appetite disorders, fatigue, unwillingness to do anything, which are classic symptoms of depression. However, despite all the signs of depression, many denied having this disorder.

Past studies have found that many more patients have been treated for depression in recent years than a couple of decades ago.

Experts suggest that this trend is related to the increased public awareness of mental disorders, and in recent years, such mental disorders have ceased to be perceived as something shameful and to reject such people. People diagnosed with depression are twice as likely to agree to take antidepressant drugs. But experts are confident that the therapy helped patients with serious problems, but did not 100% eliminate the symptoms that can cause many negative consequences. In their study, the scientists also found a decrease in the number of suicides among teenagers, but it is quite low compared to the spread of depression.

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