Hope for new mothers

It is rare for a researcher in any field to make a discovery that has the potential to fundamentally transform treatment and care.  In the field of mental health neuroscience, Dr. Jeffrey Meyer, head of the Neuroimaging Program in Mood & Anxiety at the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, has already made two.

In 2015, in his continued search for biomarkers of mental illness in the brain, Dr. Meyer found that the entire brain is a biomarker for depression, in the form of overall brain inflammation.  Using CAMH’s brain imaging technology, he found that the brains of people with depression had more inflammation—30 per cent more on average—than the brains of people who were not depressed.  The greater the inflammation, the more severe the depression.

It was such a seismic shift in thinking about mental illness and the brain that it has become one of the most highly-cited research studies internationally that CAMH has ever produced.

Just a few years later in 2017, Dr. Meyer published another ground-breaking study, this time on post-partum depression, something one out of seven (13 per cent) women experience, making it the most common serious side-effect of child birth. Still working with biomarkers, Dr. Meyer found in brain scans that women suffering from postpartum depression had elevated levels of a brain protein known as ‘MAO-A’, which is associated with mood regulation. He created a dietary supplement carefully designed to target this protein that combines two amino acids with a blueberry extract.

In the clinical study that Dr. Meyer published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, none of the new mothers who took the supplement experienced depressed mood in early postpartum, which is typically at its most severe about five days after childbirth. Depressed mood is strongly predictive of developing later clinical depression, suggesting that this supplement will successfully prevent post-partum depression. He is now following up this work with a randomized controlled clinical trial, in the hope of making this supplement available more widely.

And because the treatment is a dietary supplement, the hope is that it will successfully prevent post-partum depression without any side-effects. To realize the huge translational potential of Dr. Meyer’s innovative research, and to deliver it to women everywhere, CAMH has signed a deal with a global pharmaceutical company that is assisting in the development and commercialization of the dietary supplement. The product could be available to women around the world within the next few years.

“I am visualizing that some day all women could take this supplement to prevent getting post-partum depression,” says Dr. Meyer. That is what I see as the eventual future for it.”

Dr. Meyer continues to look for biomarker signatures and patterns that may help unravel the mysteries of the brain, both the specific kind of proteins used in the postpartum depression study as well as the functioning of the whole brain as found in the inflammation study.  

As exciting as these two discoveries are, Dr. Meyer believes they are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential for identifying more biomarkers that could transform diagnosis and treatment in the years ahead.

“I am very optimistic that over the next 20 years we are going to identify more specific aspects of the neurobiology of mental illness, and in particular Major Depressive Disorder, and be able to link those into the therapeutic streams and developing more individualized treatment.”