| Summary: | At present, depressive disorders affect a considerable proportion of population, their incidence showing an increasing tendency in the developed world. Depression mostly afflicts people in the age of 25-35. It occurs in females twice as often as in males. Depression involves an intense subjective suffering accompanied with a disruption of normal everyday functioning. Moreover, when compared with the healthy population, there exists a thirty times higher danger of suicide in the people affected with depression. The illness unfortunately tends to become chronic, the probability of recurrence of an episode being 50%. Furthermore, some patients suffering from the depressive disorder do not adequately respond to an antidepressant therapy; we call such patients treatment-resistant. There certainly exists a close relation between the endocrine and the central nervous system, most endocrine disorders being potentially accompanied with changes of psyche and vice versa. With affective disorders the most frequently reported disruption involves an interference with the function of the hypothalamicpituitary- adrenocortical (HPA) axis, though various studies repeatedly acknowledged also deviations of the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis. The most frequent findings comprise an altered serum thyrotropin response...
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