Considerable attention has focused on the growing need for evidence-based psychotherapy for veterans with affective disorders within the Department of Veteran Affairs. Despite, and possibly due to, the large number of evidence-based protocols available, several obstacles remain in their widespread delivery within Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. In part as an effort to address these concerns, ...

BACKGROUND It remains unclear whether or not a positive family history of affective disorders predicts the effectiveness of antidepressant treatment of depression. AIMS Assess the relationship of a family history of affective disorders to the efficacy of duloxetine in the treatment of depressive disorder. METHODS Seventy-seven patients with depressive disorder (as defined by the 10th editio...

The burden of affective disorders includes costs and the pain and suffering of affected individuls. Burden can be perceived from social and private perspectives. Although no ideal measure of burden exists, ample evidence documents the extensive cost and other negative impacts of affective disorders. Affective disorders are associated with disruptive family relations, higher health care costs fo...

The correlation between the affective disorders and the almost ubiquitous pathological oxidative stress can be described in a multifactorial way, as an important mechanism of central nervous system impairment. Whether the obvious changes which occur in oxidative balance of the affective disorders are a part of the constitutive mechanism or a collateral effect yet remains as an interesting quest...

Three main approaches are used to explore the neural correlates of mood disorder: neuropsychological studies, neuroimaging studies and post-mortem investigations. Lesion studies implicate disturbances in the frontal lobe, basal ganglia, striatum and anterior temporal cortex. Early neurocognitive and neuropathological investigations led to a ‘hypofrontality’ hypothesis of unipolar and bipolar de...

I review evolutionary-genetic models for the generation, maintenance and loss of allelic variation underlying polygenic disease, in the context of affective disorders and related conditions. Genetically-based liability to these disorders appears to be due to some combination of mutation-selection balance involving common, small-effect variants and rare, large-effect variants, and natural select...

Affective disorders are a group of psychiatric diseases that can affect an individual at any given age. Also called mood disorders, they can be distinguished into two different types: major depressive disorder, also called major depression, and bipolar disorder, which is known as manic depression. People affected by major depression most often have a low mood, and are consistently in a state of...