Has your mood been down, depressed? Maybe you're lacking energy or motivation. In this video we're going to look at methylfolate for depression. Specifically, we're going to look at some of the research behind this, and what it means for people with and without MTHFR gene alterations.

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Using folate and folic acid for the treatment of depression is not really a new concept, but the use of methylfolate is fairly new, or relatively new. What's interesting to note is that some of the research on methylfolate for depression is in people that don't actually have MTHFR gene alterations.

So here's a quick background for those of you who are not familiar with this concept. MTHFR is an enzyme that all of us have, but when it's altered, it leads to alterations in how we metabolize folate, and it renders the person's enzyme less capable of making methylfolate. Giving these people with this gene alteration, and the MTHFR enzyme, more methylfolate does seem to help in a lot of ways, including fatigue, depression, anxiety, among other things.

People with MTHFR alteration clearly do have a reduction in their ability to produce methylfolate. Based on some of the research that I recently came across, it seems that even those without MTHFR gene alteration but with depression may benefit from methylfolate. Well, why could this be? Well, there are other genetic alterations that some people may have, such as folate transport gene alterations, and then also, you know, maybe they're just not consuming enough folate in general, including folic acid in their foods.

And so there's an overall reduced delivery to the areas that are needed to help with neurotransmitter production. So perhaps these are some of the reasons, but let's take a look at what some of the research says about methylfolate for depression. So treatment-resistant depression is a common cohort of patients that different things are tried on. For one, they've already kind of maxed out all the things they could try. But for two, if it works on this population, there's a good chance it probably will work on other people with depression as well.

So in 2010, a study looked at this population and found that adding methylfolate to a standard therapy for depression, such as an SSRI, was effective at reducing depressive symptoms. In another study, patients were recruited from 124 different primary care practices throughout the U.S. The patients were randomly assigned to receive either methylfolate or placebo for 12 weeks.

The primary outcome that the research study was looking at was a change in the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. This is a common depression scale that's used to measure the severity of depression symptoms. The study found that the change in the Hamilton Depression Rating Score was significantly greater in the meth, in the methylfolate group compared to the placebo group, meaning that the improvements were greater.

It also found that the methylfolate group was more likely to achieve remission of their depressive symptoms more so than the placebo group. And remission in this case was defined as a 7 or less on the Hamilton Depression Rating Score. About 48 percent of the methylfolate group achieved remission versus 32 percent in the placebo group. Overall, they concluded that methylfolate is effective at improving depression symptoms in a real-world setting, and was also well-tolerated by the patients that took it.

So according to these two studies, it looks like there is some benefit to taking methylfolate for depression. There are some other studies that were funded by the maker of Deplin. These had even more positive associations, as you can assume, and Deplin is a prescription/over-the-counter product that has high doses of methylfolate in it, and so those studies, of course, may have a bit of a conflict of interest, but still it is interesting that there is some findings suggestive of methylfolate being effective at improving depression, even in people that don't have MTHFR.

I don't typically give methylfolate to people without MTHFR or some sort of folate deficiency. And even those with MTHF or gene alteration, I usually start slowly and carefully because of the potential for side effects.,

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