"Antidepressants Use the Brain's Reward Center to Work Against Depression and Chronic Nerve Pain"
Researchers today may have shined further light on a curious quirk of certain antidepressants: their ability to not only help balance out a person's mood but alleviate their chronic nerve pain as well. Their findings, published today in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, indicate that TCAs, as well as Selective Serotonin-Norepinephrine inhibitors (SNRIs), work to relieve pain through this reward system, at least in part. "Our data reveals that antidepressants that target specific neurotransmitters in the brain, particularly TCAs and SNRIs, regulate chronic pain and depression-related symptoms through actions in the nucleus accumbens," said study senior author Venetia Zachariou, PhD, an Associate Professor in the Fishberg Department of Neuroscience and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a statement. "We don't yet know if the typical pain-processing pathways in the spinal cord and the pathways we've identified in the brain reward center are directly linked, but we now know more about the cellular pathways that need to be activated in order to achieve pain relief and that effective therapeutics must target both pathways."
-Venetia Zachariou, PhD, Associate Professor in the Fishberg Department of Neuroscience and the Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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