Do antidepressants promote neurogenesis in adult hippocampus? A systematic review and meta-analysis on naive rodents.

Abstract

The neurogenic hypothesis of depression states that adult hippocampal neurogenesis is disrupted by stress and depression and is recovered by chronic treatments with antidepressants. Indeed, chronic antidepressant treatments increased newborn neurons in the adult dentate gyrus in many early studies. However, conflicting findings appeared over time. Thus, our motivation to write this unbiased systematic review and meta-analysis was to answer the following question: can antidepressants reliably promote neurogenesis in adult hippocampus? A meta-analysis was performed on studies in naive rodents. Results indicated that increased neurogenesis is a more nuanced, compound-dependent action of antidepressants than a yes-or-no event. This nuanced notion can lead to a new understanding of the concepts of neurogenic-dependent and neurogenic-independent effects of antidepressants, which would be better described as effects "more-dependent" or "less-dependent" on hippocampal neurogenesis. Further studies are on the way to investigate the strength of the causal relationship between adult hippocampal neurogenesis and behavioural effects of antidepressants.