BACKGROUND Affective disorders present an important clinical challenge in multiple sclerosis (MS). Due to prohibitive sample size requirements, population-based studies have not yet provided an adequate description of the underlying epidemiology of this association. OBJECTIVE To describe the epidemiology of affective disorders in MS in a general population sample. METHODS The study presente...

OBJECTIVE To identify independent risk factors for affective disorders in temporal lobe epilepsy. METHODS We studied 97 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) exploring variables like age, gender, family history of epilepsy and psychiatric disorders, duration of epilepsy, control of seizures, presence of aura and initial precipitant insult, abuse of substances, neuroimaging and EEG featur...

BACKGROUND It is unclear whether common affective disorders and anxiety disorders increase the risk of alcohol dependence and alcohol misuse. Aims To investigate whether affective disorders and anxiety disorders increase the risk of alcohol dependence and alcohol misuse. METHOD This study is a retrospective cohort study based on data collected from the 2007 Australia Mental Health and Well-Be...

The neurogenesis hypothesis of depression was originally formed upon the demonstration that stress impacts levels of adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Since then much work has established that newborn neurons in the dentate gyrus are required for mediating some of the beneficial effects of antidepressant treatment. Recent studies combining behavioral, molecular and electrophysiological app...

Humans retain neurobiological responses to circadian day-night cycles and seasonal changes in daylength in spite of a life-style usually independent of dawn-dusk signals. Seasonality has been documented in many functions, from mood to hormones to gene expression. Research on seasonal affective disorder initiated the first use of timed bright light as therapy, a treatment since extended to non-s...

of affective disorders (bipolar affective disorder, major depressive disorder and anxiety states) result from multiple genes that confer a susceptibility or liability to develop the disorder when other (environmental) risk factors are also present. In general, bipolar affective disorder has been found to have the highest heritability (i.e. the proportion of variance explained by additive geneti...

Despite substantial evidence for heritability in affective disorders the contributing genes have proven elusive. Here we discuss the genetic epidemiology of depression, as well as methodological issues and results from molecular genetic studies. There has been rapid advances in genetics, genomics and statistical modelling, facilitating the search for molecular mechanisms underlying affective di...

A safe and effective way to control weight in patients with affective disorders is needed, and phentermine is a possible candidate. We performed a PubMed search of articles pertaining to phentermine, sibutramine, and affective disorders. We compared the studies of phentermine with those of sibutramine. The search yielded a small number of reports. Reports concerning phentermine and affective di...

BACKGROUND One in twenty-five people suffer from a mood disorder. Current treatments are sub-optimal with poor patient response and uncertain modes-of-action. There is thus a need to better understand underlying mechanisms that determine mood, and how these go wrong in affective disorders. Systems biology approaches have yielded important biological discoveries for other complex diseases such a...