@article{Menke2019, author = {Menke, Andreas}, title = {Is the HPA axis as target for depression outdated, or is there a new hope?}, series = {Frontiers in Psychiatry}, volume = {10}, journal = {Frontiers in Psychiatry}, number = {101}, issn = {1664-0640}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00101}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-195780}, year = {2019}, abstract = {Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a very common stress-related mental disorder that carries a huge burden for affected patients and the society. It is associated with a high mortality that derives from suicidality and the development of serious medical conditions such as heart diseases, diabetes, and stroke. Although a range of effective antidepressants are available, more than 50\% of the patients do not respond to the first treatment they are prescribed and around 30\% fail to respond even after several treatment attempts. The heterogeneous condition of MDD, the lack of biomarkers matching patients with the right treatments and the situation that almost all available drugs are only targeting the serotonin, norepinephrine, or dopamine signaling, without regulating other potentially dysregulated systems may explain the insufficient treatment status. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is one of these other systems, there is numerous and robust evidence that it is implicated in MDD and other stress-related conditions, but up to date there is no specific drug targeting HPA axis components that is approved and no test that is routinely used in the clinical setting identifying patients for such a specific treatment. Is there still hope after these many years for a breakthrough of agents targeting the HPA axis? This review will cover tests detecting altered HPA axis function and the specific treatment options such as glucocorticoid receptor (GR) antagonists, corticotropin-releasing hormone 1 (CRH1) receptor antagonists, tryptophan 2,3-dioxygenase (TDO) inhibitors and FK506 binding protein 5 (FKBP5) receptor antagonists.}, language = {en} } @article{AkhrifRomanosDomschkeetal.2018, author = {Akhrif, Atae and Romanos, Marcel and Domschke, Katharina and Schmitt-Boehrer, Angelika and Neufang, Susanne}, title = {Fractal Analysis of BOLD Time Series in a Network Associated With Waiting Impulsivity}, series = {Frontiers in Physiology}, volume = {9}, journal = {Frontiers in Physiology}, issn = {1664-042X}, doi = {10.3389/fphys.2018.01378}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-189191}, pages = {1378}, year = {2018}, abstract = {Fractal phenomena can be found in numerous scientific areas including neuroscience. Fractals are structures, in which the whole has the same shape as its parts. A specific structure known as pink noise (also called fractal or 1/f noise) is one key fractal manifestation, exhibits both stability and adaptability, and can be addressed via the Hurst exponent (H). FMRI studies using H on regional fMRI time courses used fractality as an important characteristic to unravel neural networks from artificial noise. In this fMRI-study, we examined 103 healthy male students at rest and while performing the 5-choice serial reaction time task. We addressed fractality in a network associated with waiting impulsivity using the adaptive fractal analysis (AFA) approach to determine H. We revealed the fractal nature of the impulsivity network. Furthermore, fractality was influenced by individual impulsivity in terms of decreasing fractality with higher impulsivity in regions of top-down control (left middle frontal gyrus) as well as reward processing (nucleus accumbens and anterior cingulate cortex). We conclude that fractality as determined via H is a promising marker to quantify deviations in network functions at an early stage and, thus, to be able to inform preventive interventions before the manifestation of a disorder.}, language = {en} }