About one in five women ages 40 to 59 and nearly one in four women ages 60 and over used antidepressants in the last 30 days during 2015 to 2018, according to the latest data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
In midlife, the risk is greatest during the years leading up to menopause and right after it. The dramatic fluctuations in hormones that cause the most-commonly known symptoms of hot flashes and night sweats can wreak havoc on mood, too.
“Estrogen and progesterone are fluctuating a great deal,” says Lucy Hutner, a reproductive psychiatrist in New York City. “Those shifts can be hard for our brain to take.”
Scientists are working to understand just how hormones may drive depression, but receptors for estrogen and progesterone are found throughout the brain including in regions involving movement, cognition and mood regulation, says Hadine Joffe, a professor of psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
New treatments for depression in midlife women may be on the horizon. Scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health, for example, are studying a medication that acts on an estrogen receptor in the brain. The hope is that, unlike typical antidepressants, it will directly target depression symptoms related to estrogen withdrawal but without the side effects of traditional hormone therapy commonly used for menopausal symptoms.
