Betriebliches Humanvermögen

Phase Advance of the Circadian Sleep-Wake Cycle as an Antidepressant

“…A 49-year-old woman with a prior history of hypomania (bipolar II) switched into hypomania after sleep deprivation and also after breaking offthe phase-advance 17, 18, and 19 of the visual cortex are removed in the adult cat, neurons in the LGN that relay information from the retina to the cortex undergo retrograde degeneration (1). By contrast, if a similar lesion is made in the newborn kitten, some of the neurons in the LGN survive the operation and do not degenerate (2,3). Figure IA shows a frontal section through the LGN of an adult cat in which most of areas 17, 18, and 19 of the visual Psychiatr.…”

“…The human circadian system has been described (1-3) as consisting of multiple, self-sustained oscillators that are mutually coupled and that can be entrained by the zeitgebers in the environment to ensure temporal order within the organism. Aschoff has recently concluded (3): "It is still unknown whether there are illnesses specific to changes in circadian organization, and whether these disturbances can be sufficiently characterized to enable their use as diagnostic criteria. Although the hypothesis of desynchronized circadian rhythms in affective illness [4,5] underlies much psychiatric theorizing, there is not yet a sound experimental base to these theories" (3, p. 1855).…”