Thoughts on the Imbalance Mechanism of Glucose Metabolism in Depression and its Research on Traditional Chinese Medicine / 世界科学技术-中医药现代化

ABSTRACT

Depression is a common mental illness that seriously harms to the physical and mental health of human beings. Due to its biological-psychological-social interaction pathogenic feature, researchers hold different opinions for the pathogenesis of depression. Recently, accumulating the clinical and basic researches on the comorbidity of depression and diabetes make the roles of glucose metabolism, especially central glucose metabolism and insulin resistance in the pathogenesis of depression get much more attention. It has been believed that the "liver" and "spleen" are closely related to each other physiologically and pathologically. A large number of studies have confirmed that the core biological connotation of liver-spleen and pathology of traditional Chinese medicine is "emotion-energy network imbalance", which has similarities with the mechanism of glucose metabolism imbalance in depression. Therefore, it is necessary to combine the biological connotation of the liver and spleen with the modern medicine to conduct the further research, which will consequently provide scientific basis for further exploring the pathogenesis of depression and finding complementary and alternative treatment for depression.