My Research

One of my research interests is chronic depression. It turns out that about 20% of persons with serious depression don’t respond very well to medications and often have only incomplete recovery from their symptoms over many years. I’ve been one of the Hopkins researchers taking part in a large study on the genetics of depression called the GenRED study (Genetics of Recurrent Early-onset Depression) and I noticed many of these patients while doing research interviews with them. I also noticed that the usual diagnostic categories of depression didn’t apply to them very well. Basically, these patients were being missed in our study. When I started to look at the family pattern of this type of depression, it turned out that if a person with serious depression has a family member with chronic depression, he or she has a several times higher chance of also having a chronic depressive illness. You can read an article about this research here and the article in which we published this finding about a year ago here. Today, I almost finished assembling the data which will allow us to see if certain chromosome areas might be involved in this kind of depression. I’ll let you know what happens!