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Stress, sex hormones, inflammation, and major depressive disorder: Extending Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression to account for sex differences in mood disorders

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Abstract

Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression is a biologically plausible, multi-level theory that describes neural, physiologic, molecular, and genomic mechanisms that link experiences of social-environmental adversity with internal biological processes that drive depression pathogenesis, maintenance, and recurrence. Central to this theory is the hypothesis that interpersonal stressors involving social threat (e.g., social conflict, evaluation, rejection, isolation, and exclusion) upregulate inflammatory processes that can induce several depressive symptoms, including sad mood, anhedonia, fatigue, psychomotor retardation, and social-behavioral withdrawal. The original article describing this formulation (Psychol Bull 140:774–815, 2014) addressed critical questions involving depression onset and recurrence, as well as why depression is strongly predicted by early life stress and comorbid with anxiety disorders and certain physical disease conditions, such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic pain, and cardiovascular disease. Here, we extend the theory to help explain sex differences in depression prevalence, which is a defining feature of this disorder. Central to this extension is research demonstrating that ovarian hormone fluctuations modulate women’s susceptibility to stress, brain structure and function, and inflammatory activity and reactivity. These effects are evident at multiple levels and are highly context-dependent, varying as a function of several factors including sex, age, reproductive state, endogenous versus exogenous hormones, and hormone administration mode and dose. Together, these effects help explain why women are at greater risk for developing inflammation-related depressed mood and other neuropsychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative disorders during the reproductive years, especially for those already at heightened risk for depression or in the midst of a hormonal transition period.

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Preparation of this article was supported by a Society in Science—Branco Weiss Fellowship, NARSAD Young Investigator Grant #23958 from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and National Institutes of Health grant K08 MH103443 to George M. Slavich, and by a Society in Science—Branco Weiss Fellowship, NARSAD Young Investigator Grant #25032 from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and a Minerva Research Group grant from the Max Planck Society to Julia Sacher.

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Slavich, G.M., Sacher, J. Stress, sex hormones, inflammation, and major depressive disorder: Extending Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression to account for sex differences in mood disorders. Psychopharmacology 236, 3063–3079 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-019-05326-9

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