Erkrankungen des Nervensystems -

Interview mit Professor Florian Holsboer, München
Psychotherapie baut Stresshormon ab

Different Effects of Antidepressants Have Genetic Causes

About four million people in Germany suffer from depression. Many of them are treated with medication (antidepressants), but the physicians are confronted with a conundrum. While the symptoms are alleviated relatively quickly in some patients, the desired effect only sets in after several weeks in others. Sometimes, it even fails to set in at all.

The reason for this is that the effectiveness of the antidepressants is also dependent on the genetic constitution of the patient. For the first time, this was proven by scientists of the National Genome Research Network

The researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich found out that antidepressants are effectively of value even after one week if the patients have a specific variant of the FKBP-5 gene in their DNA. Patients who carry other FKBP-5 gene variants cannot reach this degree of recovery even after five weeks.

So perhaps, it will soon be possible to predict whether a certain medication will help a patient or not. In case of a depression, this would make it possible to plan a therapy much more successfully and more efficiently.

As a next step, the researchers want to clarify why the “beneficial” variant of the FKBP-5 gene can influence the effect of antidepressants. The scientists already have a first lead: the FKPB-5 gene regulates the effect of hormones in stressful situations. Small mutations in the gene can result in a particularly good synergy with certain antidepressants.

The project is part of the research area "Diseases of the Nervous System" within the National Genome Research Network. Several specialized teams of scientists collaborate here in order to explore the genetic causes as well as the possible therapies of neurological diseases.

^{Website of scientists involved in this NGFN project}