October 20, 2014 — Past research has said that up to 42 percent of all treated cases of depression do not respond to antidepressants, although it has remained largely unclear why. Now researchers have found that diet can impact how a patient responds to their medication, where fish consumption can help.
That's at least according to a study recently published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, which shows that increasing fatty fish intake appears to increase medication response rate in patients who do not normally respond to antidepressants.
According to lead researcher Roel Mocking, he and his colleagues took a closer look at "two apparently unrelated measures," the metabolism of fatty acids and the regulation of stress hormones – what is often unbalanced in people suffering from chronic depression.
"Interestingly, we saw that depressed patients had an altered metabolism of fatty acids, and that this changed metabolism was regulated in a different way by stress hormones," he explained in a recent release.
Read the full story at Nature World News