The Science behind Depression

There are over 350 million people who are affected on any given day by depression across the world, making it no wonder why this is a condition that is treated as a very serious medical illness. Unfortunately, depression is also one of the most difficult mental illnesses to treat, and this creates a tough situation for all of those afflicted with the condition. There is no blanket cure or treatment for depression, and what may work beautifully for one individual could be useless for the next, so it’s important that science begins taking a good look at the big picture when it comes to fighting this disease.

In previous years, depression was often written off by medical science as simply “an imbalance of chemicals in the brain”, but research performed by modern science has come up with some rather interesting findings. One professor at the University of San Francisco’s Department of Health Sciences made the connection between depression and genetics, stating that depression could be a hereditary condition passed down from generation to generation through genes.

Another scientific breakthrough on the topic of depression found that rather than a chemical problem in the brain, depression may actually be related to cell growth and brain connections. The hippocampus portion of the brain, the part in charge of memory and emotion, has been shown to shrink as a person experiences depression. As the hippocampus shrinks, the cells and networks that make up this portion of the brain will start to deteriorate, and this could be a huge contributing factor to the depression a person may experience.

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