The Article On Women And Psychiatry On - amazonia.fiocruz.br

New research, sheds light on one reason why drugs for mental illness work differently on men and women, and why these individual differences may exist. Turns out a key protein in the brain called AKT may function differently in males than females. Men and women experience them differently, with things like depression and anxiety far more common in females.

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A drug that works for one person may not work for another, and side effects abound. The study also offers a closer look at where, precisely, in the brain things may go wrong with it, marking an important step toward more targeted and less harmful therapies. We need to stop hitting every mental illness with the same hammer. Discovered in the s and best known for its potential role in causing cancer when mutated, AKT has more recently been identified as a key player in promoting "synaptic plasticity.

You have to make new proteins to encode that memory," explains Hoeffer.

AKT is one of the first proteins to come online, cranking the gears up on a host of downstream proteins in that memory factory. Without it, researchers have suspected, we can't learn new memories or extinguish old ones to make room for new, less harmful ones. Previous studies have linked mutations in the AKT gene to a host of problems, from schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder to autism and Alzheimer's.

Different flavors, or isoforms, function differently in the brain. Psychiatrt instance, AKT2 found exclusively in the star-shaped brain cells called astroglia, is often implicated in brain cancer.

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AKT3 appears to be important for brain growth and development. And AKT1, in combination with AKT2 in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, appears to be critical for learning and memory. Three years in the making, the study adds an important new wrinkle to the story.

Following National Institutes of Health guidelines that in the past six years began to require researchers to include both male and female animals in studies, it looked closely at how different gendered mice responded to the loss of various AKT isoforms. For instance, male mice whose AKT1 was functioning normally, were much better than those missing the protein when it came to "extinction learning" - replacing an old memory, or association, that's not useful any more.

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Imagine letting go of the memory of your favourite route home from work because you've moved or disassociating a loud sound with danger. Far more research is needed and underway, but Hoeffer suspects many other key proteins in the brain share similar nuances - with different flavours serving different purposes or acting differently in men and women. With one in five U. Follow more stories on Facebook and Twitter.]