What is it about?
Children and adolescents do not respond well to antidepressant drugs. The only antidepressants approved for use in kids and teens are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Here we use a murine model to study the antidepressant-like effect of the norepinephrine transporter (NET) inhibitor, desipramine, as well as expression levels of NET, in juveniles, adolescents, and adults. Our results suggest that NET blocking drugs may be more effective than SSRIs in treating depression in children and adolescents.
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Why is it important?
Our findings encourage further investigation of developing NET blockers, which lack the side effects of tricyclic antidepressants, for use in treating depression in children and adolescents.
Perspectives
This manuscript, together with its predecessor that examines the serotonin transporter, and response to SSRIs in juveniles and adolescents, fills important, fundamental knowledge gaps about how expression levels of NET and SERT vary across juvenile, adolescent, and adult periods, and how this relates to antidepressant-like response to NET and SERT blocking drugs. Moreover, these studies are performed in both wild-type and SERT mutant mice, so as to determine the consequences of low expressing SERT gene variants (e.g. 5HTTLPR) for response to antidepressant drugs.
Professor Lynette Daws
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ontogeny of Norepinephrine Transporter Expression and Antidepressant-Like Response to Desipramine in Wild-Type and Serotonin Transporter Mutant Mice, Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, November 2016, American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET),
DOI: 10.1124/jpet.116.237305.
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