The progress and development of antidepressants

¹ School of Biological Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 211816 (post), China
² School of Department of cell biology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta AB T6G 2R3 (post), Canada

^† These authors contributed equally.
^* Corresponding author:
^a 201821127099@njtech.edu.cn,
^b sdiao@ualberta.ca

Abstract

Major depressive disorder is a common emotional mood disorder disease, which mainly manifests as depression, cognitive impairment, weakened volition activities, loss of appetite, and sleep disorders. Depression is a common mental disorder affecting more than 264 million people worldwide. There are many antidepressant drugs in clinic, e.g., tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, selective serotonin (5-HT) reuptake inhibitors and selective norepinephrine (NA) reuptake inhibitors. Although great progress has been made in the research of new antidepressant drugs, the current clinical use of drugs still has many shortcomings, e.g., the unmet efficiency, slow onset of action, and multiple adverse reactions, which are difficult to meet the requirements of the increasing number of the depressed patients. This article mainly focuses on the development process of antidepressant drugs and compares their effects. Specifically, the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor as a new antidepressant has a good effect, which is worthy of further study. These results shed light for providing a research idea for the study of new antidepressants.