This article was co-authored by John Tucker, PhD of Zacks Investment Research, Inc.
Major depressive Disorder (MDD) is characterized by a chronic depressed mood, markedly diminished interest in normally pleasurable activities, un...
This article was co-authored by John Tucker, PhD of Zacks Investment Research, Inc.
Major depressive Disorder (MDD) is characterized by a chronic depressed mood, markedly diminished interest in normally pleasurable activities, unintentional weight changes, insomnia, fatigue, and feelings of worthlessness. The first widely used pharmacological treatment for depression was imipramine, which was discovered by accident during a research program seeking novel sedatives for treating patients with psychosis. Over the next decade a plethora of analogs of imipramine, tricylic antidepressants (TCAs), were synthesized and tested. Although some of these demonstrated a modest reduction in side effects such as sedation and anticholinergic effects, no significant improvement in the modest efficacy of imipramine was achieved (Goodman and Gilman, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 10th ed.).The availability of more sophisticated pharmacological methods in the 1970s led to multiple theories of how the TCAs exert their activity, in turn leading to a