Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Depression is one of the most common and debilitating mental health problems, often developing in adolescence and persisting into adulthood. Although many treatments have been developed, many show little success in treating depression in youth and may even increase symptoms of anxiety and risk of suicide. This outlines a strong need for safer, more effective treatments for depression in adolescents. A potential solution is transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that sends very weak electrical current through the scalp to induce long lasting changes in the brain. Many studies have already suggested the safety, feasibility, and tolerability of its use.I hypothesize that tDCS can be safely and effectively used alone or in combination with current antidepressant drugs to treat adolescent depression without causing the adverse side effects characteristic of current antidepressant therapies. I anticipate that juvenile rats who receive tDCS treatment will show less depressive and anxiety-like behaviour than rats who do not. I also expect that chronic use of Prozac, a common antidepressant, will result in the worsening of depression-related symptoms, and that tDCS treatment will reverse these side effects. Depression causes a variety of social, cognitive, and educational deficits. As such, early treatment of depression is a major public health concern. There is a pressing need for novel treatments that can effectively treat depression without causing adverse side effects. This project will examine the underlying mechanisms of tDCS and could guide further research towards its use as a simple, inexpensive, and non-invasive treatment for adolescent depression in humans.