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Serum concentrations of thyroxine (T4), triiodothyronine (T3), and thyrotropine were measured in 34 patients with nonseasonal affective disorders
before and after 1 week of light treatment. Nineteen of these patients received bright
white light (2500 lx) and 15 dim red light (50 lx) for 2 hours daily in the mornings
over a 1-week period. Slight but significant reductions in the rating scores for the
depressive symptomatology were found for both the bright- and dim-light groups, but
there were no significant differences between the two groups. The improvement is thus
most likely a placebo effect. Surprisingly, the small changes in the severity of the
depressive symptoms in the group as a whole were significantly correlated to the changes
in the serum levels of T4 during the weeks of bright- and dim-light treatment, respectively. The more a patient
improved, the further his or her T4 level fell and vice versa. The fluctuations in the concentrations of T4 during light treatment were significantly greater in the depressed patients than
in a group of 12 healthy controls who also received bright or dim light, whereas the
changes in T3 were significantly smaller than those of the healthy controls. The pronounced fluctuations
in T4 levels were probably not secondary to changes in mood. Rather, they are likely to
reflect changes in tissue (intracellular) metabolism of T4, which may be involved in the mechanisms underlying the fluctuations in mood in these
patients.
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Article info
Publication history
Received in revised form:
October 17,
1995
Received:
March 27,
1995
Footnotes
This study was supported in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Grant Ba932/5-2).
Identification
Copyright
© 1996 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc.
