Also, the beneficial effects of an antidepressant were blunted in mice fed a high-fat diet. "When treatingdepression, in general there is no predictor of treatment resistance," said Dr. Bruno Guiard, senior author of theBritish Journal of Pharmacology study. "So if we consider metabolic disorders as a putative treatment resistance predictor, this should encourage psychiatrists to put in place a personalized treatment with antidepressant drugs that do not further destabilize metabolism."
On the other hand, taking mice off a high-fat diet completely reversed the animals' metabolic impairments and lessened their anxious symptoms. "This finding reinforcing the idea that the normalization of metabolic parameters may give a better chance of achieving remission, particularly in depressed patients with type 2 diabetes," said Dr. Guiard.