PubMed · 162500
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L Colonna, M Petit, J P Lepine. 1979. Bromocriptine in affective disorders. A pilot study.. https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-0327(79)90002-8
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The term "depression" is used to describe a normal mood, a medical symptom, and a collection of psychiatric symptoms. As a normal mood, depression is a common human reaction to a significant loss; as a medical term, it is also used to describe the sadness seen in patients who have other severe medical and psychiatric disorders. Most often, however, "depression" refers to a group of psychiatric syndromes or illnesses with well defined symptoms only one of which is sadness. Depression syndromes are probably universal. There are accounts of depressive illness throughout history from almost every human society. The universality of depressive illness is also reflected in the frequency of depression as a theme of the world's great literature. Studies of the biochemical correlates of psychotic depression have focused on two major hypotheses. The first proposes that affective disorders result from functional changes in the central noradrenergic systems. The second postulates that the primary abnormality is in central serotonergic pathways. These two hypotheses are supported by the pharmacological effects of antidepressant drugs.
Seventy-two spouses of subjects with recurrent primary affective disorders (PAD), were investigated for the presence of psychiatric disorders in their lives and in those of their first degree relatives, and compared with 71 spouses of non-psychiatrically ill control subjects. No difference was found in the risk for PAD; on the other hand spouses of affective patients manifested a greater occurrence of psychiatric disorders belonging to the affective spectrum, as did their respective first-degree relatives.
In order to evaluate the presumed involvement of altered noradrenergic receptor sensitivity in the switch process from depression into mania, we explored the relationship between pretreatment 3-methoxy-4-hydroxy-phenylglycol (MHPG) and tricyclic-induced mania or hypomania in bipolar depressed patients. Within the group of patients developing mania or hypomania on tricyclics, there was a strong positive correlation between pretreatment 24-hour urinary MHPG and the latency of onset of the episode. This finding is consistent with both the reported differences in MHPG excretion between unipolar and bipolar patients and the postulated noradrenergic involvement in the switch process.