One Day, There Might Be a Drug for a Broken Heart
For Tony Y., 37, healing from heartbreak is slow and incomplete. Each of several exes is associated with a cluster of sore memories. Although he loves the Blue Ridge Mountains, he can't visit because they remind him of a romantic holiday years ago.
If a new drug made rejections less painful, one expert argues, it could relieve or even prevent major depression.
Like some 30 to 40 percent of depressed patients, Tony hasn't had success with current anti-depressants. One day, psychiatrists may be able to offer him a new kind of opioid, an anti-depressant for people suffering from the cruel pain of rejection.
A Surprising Discovery
As we move through life, rejections -- bullying in school, romantic breakups, and divorces -- are powerful triggers to depressive episodes, observes David Hsu, a neuroscientist at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in Long Island, New York. If a new drug made them less painful, he argues, it could relieve or even prevent major depression.
Our bodies naturally produce opioids to soothe physical pain, and opioid drugs like morphine and oxycodone work by plugging into the same receptors in our brains. The same natural opioids may also respond to emotional hurts, and painkillers can dramatically affect mood. Today's epidemic of opioid abuse raises the question: How many lives might have been saved if we had a safe, non-addictive option for medicating emotional pain?
Already one anti-depressant, tianeptine, locks into the mu opioid receptor, the target of morphine and oxycodone. Scientists knew that tianeptine, prescribed in some countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, acted differently than the most common anti-depressants in use today, which affect the levels of other brain chemicals, serotonin and norepinephrine. But the discovery in 2014 that tianeptine tapped the mu receptor was a "huge surprise," says co-author Jonathan Javitch, chief of the Division of Molecular Therapeutics at Columbia University.
The news arrived when scientists' basic understanding of depression is in flux; viewed biologically, it may cover several disorders. One of them could hinge on opioids. It's possible that some people release fewer opioids naturally or that the receptors for it are less effective.
Javitch has launched a startup, Kures, to make tianeptine more effective and convenient and to find other opioid-modulators. That may seem quixotic in the midst of an opioid epidemic, but tianeptine doesn't create dependency in low, prescription doses and has been used safely around the world for decades. To identify likely patients, cofounder Andrew Kruegel is looking for ways to "segment the depressed population by measures that have to do with opioid release," he says.
Is Emotional Pain Actually "Pain"?
No one imagines that the pain from rejection or loss is the same as pain from a broken leg. Physical pain is two perceptions—a sensory perception and an "affective" one, which makes pain unpleasant.
Exploration of an overlap between physical and what research psychologists call "social pain" has heated up since the mid-2000s.
The sensory perception, processed by regions of the brain called the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices and the posterior insula, tells us whether the pain is in your arm or your leg, how strong it is and whether it is a sting, ache, or has some other quality. The affective perception, in another part of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, tells us that we want the pain to stop, fast! When people with lesions in the latter areas experience a stimulus that ordinarily would be painful, they don't mind it.
Science now suggests that emotional pain arises in the affective brain circuits. Exploration of an overlap between physical and what research psychologists call "social pain" has heated up since the mid-2000s. Animal evidence goes back to the 1970s: babies separated from their mothers showed less distress when given morphine, and more if dosed with naloxone, the opioid antagonist.
Parents, of course, face the question of whether Baby feels alone or wet whenever she howls. And the answer is: both hurt. Being abandoned is the ultimate threat in our early life, and it makes sense that a brain system to monitor social threats would piggyback upon an existing system for pain. Piggybacking is a feature of evolution. An ancestor who felt "hurt" when threatened by rejection might learn adaptive behavior: to cooperate or run.
In 2010, a large multi-university team led by Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky, reported that acetaminophen (Tylenol) reduced social pain. Undergraduates took 500 mg of acetaminophen upon awakening and at bedtime every day for three weeks and reported nightly about their day using a previously-tested "Hurt Feelings Scale," rating how strongly they agreed with questions like, "Today, being teased hurt my feelings."
Over the weeks, their reports of hurt feelings steadily declined, while remaining flat in a control group that took placebos. In a second experiment, the research group showed that, compared to controls, people who had taken acetaminophen for three weeks showed less brain activity in the affective brain circuits while they experienced rejection during a virtual ball-tossing game. Later, Hsu's brain scan research supported the idea that rejection triggers the mu opioid receptor system, which normally provides pain-dampening opioids.
More evidence comes from nonhuman primates with lesions in the affective circuits: They cry less when separated from caregivers or social groups.
Heartbreak seems to lie in those regions: women with major depression are more hurt by romantic rejection than normal controls are and show more activity in those areas in brain scans, Hsu found. Also, factors that make us more vulnerable to rejection -- like low self-esteem -- are linked to more activity in the key areas, studies show.
The trait "high rejection sensitivity" increases your risk of depression more than "global neuroticism" does, Hsu observes, and predicts a poor recovery from depression. Pain sensitivity is another clue: People with a gene linked to it seem to be more hurt by social exclusion. Once you're depressed, you become more rejection-sensitive and prone to pain—a classic bad feedback loop.
"Ideally, we'd have biomarkers to distinguish when loss becomes complicated grief and then depression, and we might prevent the transition with a drug."
Helen Mayberg, a neurologist renowned for her study of brain circuits in depression, sees, as Hsu does, the possibility of preventing depressions. "Nobody would suggest we treat routine bad social pain with drugs. But it is true that in susceptible people, losing a partner, for example, can lead to a full-blown depression," says Mayberg, who is the founding director of The Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. "Ideally, we'd have biomarkers to distinguish when loss becomes complicated grief and then depression, and we might prevent the transition with a drug. It would be like taking medication when you feel the warning symptoms of a headache to prevent a full-blown migraine."
A Way Out of the Opioid Crisis?
The exploration of social pain should lead us to a deeper understanding of pain, beyond the sharp distinctions between "physical" and "psychological." Finding our way out of the current crisis may require that deeper understanding. About half of the people with opioid prescriptions have mental health disorders. "I expect there are a lot of people using street opioids—heroin or prescriptions purchased from others--to self-medicate psychological pain," Kreugel says.
What we may need, he suggests, is "a new paradigm for using opioids in psychiatry: low, sub-analgesic, sub-euphoric dosing." But so far it hasn't been easy. Investors don't flock to fund psychiatric drugs and in 2018, the word opioid is poison.
As for Tony Y., he's struggled for three years to recover from his most serious relationship. "Driving around highways looking at exit signs toward places we visited together sometimes fills me with unbearable anguish," he admits. "And because we used to do so much bird watching together, sometimes a mere glimpse of a random bird sets me off." He perks up at the idea of a heartbreak drug. "If the side effects didn't seem bad, I would consider it, absolutely."
When a patient is diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, having surgery to remove the tumor is considered the standard of care. But what happens when a patient can’t have surgery?
Whether it’s due to high blood pressure, advanced age, heart issues, or other reasons, some breast cancer patients don’t qualify for a lumpectomy—one of the most common treatment options for early-stage breast cancer. A lumpectomy surgically removes the tumor while keeping the patient’s breast intact, while a mastectomy removes the entire breast and nearby lymph nodes.
Fortunately, a new technique called cryoablation is now available for breast cancer patients who either aren’t candidates for surgery or don’t feel comfortable undergoing a surgical procedure. With cryoablation, doctors use an ultrasound or CT scan to locate any tumors inside the patient’s breast. They then insert small, needle-like probes into the patient's breast which create an “ice ball” that surrounds the tumor and kills the cancer cells.
Cryoablation has been used for decades to treat cancers of the kidneys and liver—but only in the past few years have doctors been able to use the procedure to treat breast cancer patients. And while clinical trials have shown that cryoablation works for tumors smaller than 1.5 centimeters, a recent clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York has shown that it can work for larger tumors, too.
In this study, doctors performed cryoablation on patients whose tumors were, on average, 2.5 centimeters. The cryoablation procedure lasted for about 30 minutes, and patients were able to go home on the same day following treatment. Doctors then followed up with the patients after 16 months. In the follow-up, doctors found the recurrence rate for tumors after using cryoablation was only 10 percent.
For patients who don’t qualify for surgery, radiation and hormonal therapy is typically used to treat tumors. However, said Yolanda Brice, M.D., an interventional radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, “when treated with only radiation and hormonal therapy, the tumors will eventually return.” Cryotherapy, Brice said, could be a more effective way to treat cancer for patients who can’t have surgery.
“The fact that we only saw a 10 percent recurrence rate in our study is incredibly promising,” she said.
Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.
But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.
Clinicians from the Royal Berkshire Hospital presented the results of a long-term, nine-year clinical trial where 89 men and women who suffered from recurrent UTIs were given an oral vaccine called MV140, designed to prevent the infections. Every day for three months, the participants were given two sprays of the vaccine (flavored to taste like pineapple) and then followed over the course of nine years. Clinicians analyzed medical records and asked the study participants about symptoms to check whether any experienced UTIs or had any adverse reactions from taking the vaccine.
The results showed that across nine years, 48 of the participants (about 54%) remained completely infection-free. On average, the study participants remained infection free for 54.7 months—four and a half years.
“While we need to be pragmatic, this vaccine is a potential breakthrough in preventing UTIs and could offer a safe and effective alternative to conventional treatments,” said Gernot Bonita, Professor of Urology at the Alta Bro Medical Centre for Urology in Switzerland, who is also the EAU Chairman of Guidelines on Urological Infections.
The news comes as a relief not only for people who suffer chronic UTIs, but also to doctors who have seen an uptick in antibiotic-resistant UTIs in the past several years. Because UTIs usually require antibiotics, patients run the risk of developing a resistance to the antibiotics, making infections more difficult to treat. A preventative vaccine could mean less infections, less antibiotics, and less drug resistance overall.
“Many of our participants told us that having the vaccine restored their quality of life,” said Dr. Bob Yang, Consultant Urologist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, who helped lead the research. “While we’re yet to look at the effect of this vaccine in different patient groups, this follow-up data suggests it could be a game-changer for UTI prevention if it’s offered widely, reducing the need for antibiotic treatments.”