How do antidepressants work?
If do not go into details, antidepressants are able to correct the work of some mechanisms of the brain. Our brain includes a lot of nerve cells – neurons. Although there is a communication between neurons, they do not adjoin each other – there is a chink between them, which is called synaptic cleft or synapse.
The task of information transfer from one neutron to another and transfer it through the synapse is the chemical mediator – the mediator (lat. mediator). According to the theory of depression – by disease the concentration of some mediators in synapse is falling. The biochemical processes of our brain are very difficult, and a lot of mediators take here part. Nowadays there are only thirty of them, and only three are directly related to depression. These are noradrenaline, serotonin and dopamine. They are called biogenic amines. Antidepressants, regulating a concentration of one or several biogenic amines, correct mechanisms of brain’s activity, which were broken following the depression.
Tags: amines, antidepressant, dopamine, neurons, noradrenaline, serotonin, synapse, synaptic