For more than two thousand patients who had cycled through years of antidepressant regimens without relief, the problem was never solely in their heads. A new study published in Brain Medicine tracked 2,197 individuals across six years and found that specific dysfunctions of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, namely alpha-sympathetic withdrawal and parasympathetic excess, were starving the brain of adequate blood flow in ways that mimicked or magnified depressive states. Once clinicians identified and corrected those autonomic imbalances using low-dose pharmacologic and lifestyle interventions, 95 percent of subjects experienced symptom relief, plummeting from an average of 23.2 reported symptoms at baseline to 5.2 at final follow-up. The findings challenge the assumption that patients who fail standard antidepressants are simply treatment resistant.

BU neuroscientist Alice Cronin-Golomb and physicist Plamen Ch. Ivanov have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a prestigious, century-and-a-half-old honor whose previous inductees include Thomas Edison and W.E.B. Du Bois.