One step closer.. 👣 On August 5, the FDA is expected to decide whether to approve the first pill, zuranolone, specifically designed to treat postpartum depression. 📸: Peter Finch // 🔗
after giving birth. Soon, there may finally be a convenient, fast-acting medication to treat it—if the Food and Drug Administration gives it the green light.
“This will be a game changer,” says Jennifer Payne, director of the Reproductive Psychiatry Research Program at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who treats patients with postpartum depression and researches the biological mechanisms behind it. During pregnancy, the hormones estrogen and progesterone increase about 10-fold. A few days after delivery, they plummet to pre-pregnancy levels. This sudden drop is thought to be a major contributing factor to postpartum depression.
Essentially, zuranolone works by “resetting the neural circuits back to normal functioning, so that the brain can handle stress as it should,” says Kristina Deligiannidis, a psychiatrist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York who led a clinical trial of the medication., followed 196 women with postpartum depression for 45 days. Half were randomized to receive zuranolone, while the other half got a placebo.
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