RESEARCHERS UNCOVER A POSSIBLE GENETIC CAUSE OF DEPRESSION

New Orleans, LA (June 21, 1998) - The connection between sleep, depression, and genetics was examined at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center studied the sleep of patients with depression and their families. Their work, inspired by findings over the last 30 years that show abnormal activity in the sleeping brain of patients suffering from depression, found that these patients were much more likely to have family members with very similar brain wave activity.

The study's principal investigator, Donna Giles, PhD, remarked, "Sleep is not merely 'time out' from daily life. It is an active state, essential for physical and mental restoration. Sleep disturbances are among the cardinal symptoms of mood disorders and for a long time, it was thought that sleep returned to normal when mood returned to normal. Indeed, people who have recovered from depression report that they are sleeping much better."

For years, researchers who recorded the brain wave activity during sleep thought that the abnormalities they found among depressed patients disappeared with recovery. Important studies in the past 10 years, however, revealed that underlying abnormalities in sleep organization persisted, despite patients' feeling better and reporting better sleep.

The present study has taken advantage of these results to produce groundbreaking findings. Dr. Giles and her team studied patients with depression, along with their parents and siblings, for their personal experience with depression and their brain wave activity during sleep. They found that patients with abnormal brain-wave activity during sleep had an increased likelihood of having family members with very similar brain activity during sleep. This brain wave activity was observed even though all family members were reported to be "feeling fine.". Importantly, these same family members were very likely to have experienced depression at some point in their lives.

After 12 years of phone calls to patients and their family members, researchers found that family members of patients with abnormal sleep suffered much more from depression. They also found that family members of patients who had essentially normal sleep also suffered, to a lesser extent, from depression, but that depression in these individuals was most often related to their beliefs and moment-to-moment thinking.

Dr. Giles said, "This finding is an important step in the study of depression. It provides a solid foundation for determining the mechanisms that affect both the genetic transmission of depression and the psychological factors that provide vulnerability to depression."

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