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Friday, November 6, 2009

Are female humans are the only mammals that suffer from post-natal depression?


Are female humans are the only mammals that suffer from post-natal depression?

there is some evidence that some animals can have post-natal depression. The main animals that have been looked at are rats and mice because they've mainly been used as laboratory models for humans and they do find that rats can show depressive symptoms, things like poor nursing, signs of stress and anxiety after birth and they were also quite useful, you can manipulate the hormone levels in rats to bring on post-natal depression type symptoms and there’s some labs that are doing this and are trying to test interventions and ways to help reduce this because it’s definitely thought that changing hormone levels, increases in cortisol, drops in females sex hormones help to bring on this kind of problem. There are some interesting mice models as well; particularly mice who have faults in their GABA receptors in their brain on their brain cells and the nerve cells are much more likely to show these kind of depressive symptoms after birth and a terrible experiment has been in done rats they find that if they take their puppies away for short lengths of time, well not like you know days, if they take their pups away it does induce depression like symptoms. I can’t find any evidence about larger animals but there are certainly some anecdotes out there about dogs and cats. Some of them showing post-natal depression types symptoms like not nursing properly and not really being themselves.

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