New dietary supplement may have role in curbing postpartum blues

By Will Boggs MD

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A dietary supplement containing tryptophan and tyrosine and antioxidants appears to curb postpartum depressed mood, according to an open-label, non-randomized study.

"It was interesting that the women taking the supplement had virtually no tendency towards getting sad mood in sharp contrast to the women not taking the supplement who really had their mood plummet on day 5 postpartum,” Dr. Jeffrey H. Meyer from Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada told Reuters Health by email.

Postpartum blues is said to affect about 75% of women during postpartum days 4-6, typically peaking on day 5 and resolving within 10 days. It has been linked to elevations in monoamine oxidase A which are attributed in large part to the postpartum decline in estrogen levels.

Dr. Meyer and colleagues investigated whether a dietary supplement they created reduced vulnerability to depressed mood at postpartum day 5 in an open-label study of 21 women who received the dietary supplement versus 20 women who did not receive any supplement.

The dietary supplement contained 2 g tryptophan, 10 g tyrosine and blueberry juice. It was well tolerated by all women, and there were no adverse effects.

After a procedure designed to induce sadness, depressed mood as measured by a visual analog scale increased by a mean 43.85 mm in the untreated controls but by only 0.05 mm in the supplemented group, the researchers report in PNAS, online March 13.

Similarly, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) depression score increased by 8.95 after the mood induction procedure in the control group and decreased by 0.05 in the supplemented group.

Two women in the control group and one in a supplemented group endorsed symptoms of major depressive episode within the first months months postpartum.

“When the women know they are taking the supplement, it completely gets rid of the sadness of postpartum blues,” Dr. Meyer said. “In the next study women will be blinded as to whether they are taking the supplement or not.”

“There is a promising dietary strategy to reduce postpartum blues, which should be available in the next couple of years,” he concluded. “Since postpartum blues, when severe, raises the risk for clinical-level postpartum depression fourfold, it has exciting potential as a strategy to prevent postpartum depression. The design of this dietary supplement is novel because it is based on addressing specific temporary brain changes in early postpartum that also occur in clinical depression.”

Dr. Meyer added, “People should not go ahead and make the supplement themselves but should wait until there is approval for it in the country they live in.”

Dr. Meyer is developing natural health products to treat high-risk states for major depressive disorder and is listed as the inventor on a patent application for this dietary supplement. One of the other five authors is developing natural health products to overcome a higher monoamine oxidase A state early postpartum.

SOURCE: bit.ly/2m59T3p

Proc Natl Acad Sci 2017.

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