A team led by Caroline Ménard of the CERVO Research Centre and Laval University may have discovered why major depression affects women and men differently. The team’s analyses of the brains of people who, at the time of their death, were suffering from depression revealed the presence of alterations in the brain barrier, but these alterations were located in different brain regions depending on gender. The team’s work, published today in Nature Communications, also identified a potential biomarker for depression in women.
A recent article on the ULaval news site describes this discovery: Read the article by Jean Hamann (in French) here
Read the original research article in Nature Communications (open access):
Dion-Albert L, Cadoret A, Doney E, Kaufmann FN, Dudek KA, Daigle B, Parise LF, Cathomas F, Samba N, Hudson N, Lebel M; Signature Consortium, Campbell M, Turecki G, Mechawar N, Menard C. Vascular and blood-brain barrier-related
changes underlie stress responses and resilience in female mice and depression in human tissue. Nat Commun. 2022 Jan 10;13(1):164. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-27604-x
