One Day, There Might Be a Drug for a Broken Heart
A sad woman peering through sunlit blinds.
For Tony Y., 37, healing from heartbreak is slow and incomplete. Each of several exes is associated with a cluster of sore memories. Although he loves the Blue Ridge Mountains, he can't visit because they remind him of a romantic holiday years ago.
If a new drug made rejections less painful, one expert argues, it could relieve or even prevent major depression.
Like some 30 to 40 percent of depressed patients, Tony hasn't had success with current anti-depressants. One day, psychiatrists may be able to offer him a new kind of opioid, an anti-depressant for people suffering from the cruel pain of rejection.
A Surprising Discovery
As we move through life, rejections -- bullying in school, romantic breakups, and divorces -- are powerful triggers to depressive episodes, observes David Hsu, a neuroscientist at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in Long Island, New York. If a new drug made them less painful, he argues, it could relieve or even prevent major depression.
Our bodies naturally produce opioids to soothe physical pain, and opioid drugs like morphine and oxycodone work by plugging into the same receptors in our brains. The same natural opioids may also respond to emotional hurts, and painkillers can dramatically affect mood. Today's epidemic of opioid abuse raises the question: How many lives might have been saved if we had a safe, non-addictive option for medicating emotional pain?
Already one anti-depressant, tianeptine, locks into the mu opioid receptor, the target of morphine and oxycodone. Scientists knew that tianeptine, prescribed in some countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, acted differently than the most common anti-depressants in use today, which affect the levels of other brain chemicals, serotonin and norepinephrine. But the discovery in 2014 that tianeptine tapped the mu receptor was a "huge surprise," says co-author Jonathan Javitch, chief of the Division of Molecular Therapeutics at Columbia University.
The news arrived when scientists' basic understanding of depression is in flux; viewed biologically, it may cover several disorders. One of them could hinge on opioids. It's possible that some people release fewer opioids naturally or that the receptors for it are less effective.
Javitch has launched a startup, Kures, to make tianeptine more effective and convenient and to find other opioid-modulators. That may seem quixotic in the midst of an opioid epidemic, but tianeptine doesn't create dependency in low, prescription doses and has been used safely around the world for decades. To identify likely patients, cofounder Andrew Kruegel is looking for ways to "segment the depressed population by measures that have to do with opioid release," he says.
Is Emotional Pain Actually "Pain"?
No one imagines that the pain from rejection or loss is the same as pain from a broken leg. Physical pain is two perceptions—a sensory perception and an "affective" one, which makes pain unpleasant.
Exploration of an overlap between physical and what research psychologists call "social pain" has heated up since the mid-2000s.
The sensory perception, processed by regions of the brain called the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices and the posterior insula, tells us whether the pain is in your arm or your leg, how strong it is and whether it is a sting, ache, or has some other quality. The affective perception, in another part of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, tells us that we want the pain to stop, fast! When people with lesions in the latter areas experience a stimulus that ordinarily would be painful, they don't mind it.
Science now suggests that emotional pain arises in the affective brain circuits. Exploration of an overlap between physical and what research psychologists call "social pain" has heated up since the mid-2000s. Animal evidence goes back to the 1970s: babies separated from their mothers showed less distress when given morphine, and more if dosed with naloxone, the opioid antagonist.
Parents, of course, face the question of whether Baby feels alone or wet whenever she howls. And the answer is: both hurt. Being abandoned is the ultimate threat in our early life, and it makes sense that a brain system to monitor social threats would piggyback upon an existing system for pain. Piggybacking is a feature of evolution. An ancestor who felt "hurt" when threatened by rejection might learn adaptive behavior: to cooperate or run.
In 2010, a large multi-university team led by Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky, reported that acetaminophen (Tylenol) reduced social pain. Undergraduates took 500 mg of acetaminophen upon awakening and at bedtime every day for three weeks and reported nightly about their day using a previously-tested "Hurt Feelings Scale," rating how strongly they agreed with questions like, "Today, being teased hurt my feelings."
Over the weeks, their reports of hurt feelings steadily declined, while remaining flat in a control group that took placebos. In a second experiment, the research group showed that, compared to controls, people who had taken acetaminophen for three weeks showed less brain activity in the affective brain circuits while they experienced rejection during a virtual ball-tossing game. Later, Hsu's brain scan research supported the idea that rejection triggers the mu opioid receptor system, which normally provides pain-dampening opioids.
More evidence comes from nonhuman primates with lesions in the affective circuits: They cry less when separated from caregivers or social groups.
Heartbreak seems to lie in those regions: women with major depression are more hurt by romantic rejection than normal controls are and show more activity in those areas in brain scans, Hsu found. Also, factors that make us more vulnerable to rejection -- like low self-esteem -- are linked to more activity in the key areas, studies show.
The trait "high rejection sensitivity" increases your risk of depression more than "global neuroticism" does, Hsu observes, and predicts a poor recovery from depression. Pain sensitivity is another clue: People with a gene linked to it seem to be more hurt by social exclusion. Once you're depressed, you become more rejection-sensitive and prone to pain—a classic bad feedback loop.
"Ideally, we'd have biomarkers to distinguish when loss becomes complicated grief and then depression, and we might prevent the transition with a drug."
Helen Mayberg, a neurologist renowned for her study of brain circuits in depression, sees, as Hsu does, the possibility of preventing depressions. "Nobody would suggest we treat routine bad social pain with drugs. But it is true that in susceptible people, losing a partner, for example, can lead to a full-blown depression," says Mayberg, who is the founding director of The Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. "Ideally, we'd have biomarkers to distinguish when loss becomes complicated grief and then depression, and we might prevent the transition with a drug. It would be like taking medication when you feel the warning symptoms of a headache to prevent a full-blown migraine."
A Way Out of the Opioid Crisis?
The exploration of social pain should lead us to a deeper understanding of pain, beyond the sharp distinctions between "physical" and "psychological." Finding our way out of the current crisis may require that deeper understanding. About half of the people with opioid prescriptions have mental health disorders. "I expect there are a lot of people using street opioids—heroin or prescriptions purchased from others--to self-medicate psychological pain," Kreugel says.
What we may need, he suggests, is "a new paradigm for using opioids in psychiatry: low, sub-analgesic, sub-euphoric dosing." But so far it hasn't been easy. Investors don't flock to fund psychiatric drugs and in 2018, the word opioid is poison.
As for Tony Y., he's struggled for three years to recover from his most serious relationship. "Driving around highways looking at exit signs toward places we visited together sometimes fills me with unbearable anguish," he admits. "And because we used to do so much bird watching together, sometimes a mere glimpse of a random bird sets me off." He perks up at the idea of a heartbreak drug. "If the side effects didn't seem bad, I would consider it, absolutely."
The upcoming vaccine is changing the way we look at treating one of the country’s deadliest cancers.
Last week, researchers at the University of Oxford announced that they have received funding to create a brand new way of preventing ovarian cancer: A vaccine. The vaccine, known as OvarianVax, will teach the immune system to recognize and destroy mutated cells—one of the earliest indicators of ovarian cancer.
Understanding Ovarian Cancer
Despite advancements in medical research and treatment protocols over the last few decades, ovarian cancer still poses a significant threat to women’s health. In the United States alone, more than 12,0000 women die of ovarian cancer each year, and only about half of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer survive five or more years past diagnosis. Unlike cervical cancer, there is no routine screening for ovarian cancer, so it often goes undetected until it has reached advanced stages. Additionally, the primary symptoms of ovarian cancer—frequent urination, bloating, loss of appetite, and abdominal pain—can often be mistaken for other non-cancerous conditions, delaying treatment.
An American woman has roughly a one percent chance of developing ovarian cancer throughout her lifetime. However, these odds increase significantly if she has inherited mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. Women who carry these mutations face a 46% lifetime risk for ovarian and breast cancers.
An Unlikely Solution
To address this escalating health concern, the organization Cancer Research UK has invested £600,000 over the next three years in research aimed at creating a vaccine, which would destroy cancerous cells before they have a chance to develop any further.
Researchers at the University of Oxford are at the forefront of this initiative. With funding from Cancer Research UK, scientists will use tissue samples from the ovaries and fallopian tubes of patients currently battling ovarian cancer. Using these samples, University of Oxford scientists will create a vaccine to recognize certain proteins on the surface of ovarian cancer cells known as tumor-associated antigens. The vaccine will then train that person’s immune system to recognize the cancer markers and destroy them.
The next step
Once developed, the vaccine will first be tested in patients with the disease, to see if their ovarian tumors will shrink or disappear. Then, the vaccine will be tested in women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations as well as women in the general population without genetic mutations, to see whether the vaccine can prevent the cancer altogether.
While the vaccine still has “a long way to go,” according to Professor Ahmed Ahmed, Director of Oxford University’s ovarian cancer cell laboratory, he is “optimistic” about the results.
“We need better strategies to prevent ovarian cancer,” said Ahmed in a press release from the University of Oxford. “Currently, women with BRCA1/2 mutations are offered surgery which prevents cancer but robs them of the chance to have children afterward.
Teaching the immune system to recognize the very early signs of cancer is a tough challenge. But we now have highly sophisticated tools which give us real insights into how the immune system recognizes ovarian cancer. OvarianVax could offer the solution.”
How sharing, hearing, and remembering positive stories can help shape our brains for the better
Across cultures and through millennia, human beings have always told stories. Whether it’s a group of boy scouts around a campfire sharing ghost stories or the paleolithic Cro-Magnons etching pictures of bison on cave walls, researchers believe that storytelling has been universal to human beings since the development of language.
But storytelling was more than just a way for our ancestors to pass the time. Researchers believe that storytelling served an important evolutionary purpose, helping humans learn empathy, share important information (such as where predators were or what berries were safe to eat), as well as strengthen social bonds. Quite literally, storytelling has made it possible for the human race to survive.
Today, neuroscientists are discovering that storytelling is just as important now as it was millions of years ago. Particularly in sharing positive stories, humans can more easily form relational bonds, develop a more flexible perspective, and actually grow new brain circuitry that helps us survive. Here’s how.
How sharing stories positively impacts the brain
When human beings share stories, it increases the levels of certain neurochemicals in the brain, neuroscientists have found. In a 2021 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Swedish researchers found that simply hearing a story could make hospitalized children feel better, compared to other hospitalized children who played a riddle game for the same amount of time. In their research, children in the intensive care unit who heard stories for just 30 minutes had higher levels of oxytocin, a hormone that promotes positive feelings and is linked to relaxation, trust, social connectedness, and overall psychological stability. Furthermore, the same children showed lower levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. Afterward, the group of children who heard stories tended to describe their hospital experiences more positively, and even reported lower levels of pain.
Annie Brewster, MD, knows the positive effect of storytelling from personal experience. An assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of The Healing Power of Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Navigate Illness, Trauma, and Loss, Brewster started sharing her personal experience with chronic illness after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001. In doing so, Brewster says it has enabled her to accept her diagnosis and integrate it into her identity. Brewster believes so much in the power of hearing and sharing stories that in 2013 she founded Health Story Collaborative, a forum for others to share their mental and physical health challenges.“I wanted to hear stories of people who had found ways to move forward in positive ways, in spite of health challenges,” Brewster said. In doing so, Brewster believes people with chronic conditions can “move closer to self-acceptance and self-love.”
While hearing and sharing positive stories has been shown to increase oxytocin and other “feel good” chemicals, simply remembering a positive story has an effect on our brains as well. Mark Hoelterhoff, PhD, a lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Edinburgh, recalling and “savoring” a positive story, thought, or feedback “begins to create new brain circuitry—a new neural network that’s geared toward looking for the positive,” he says. Over time, other research shows, savoring positive stories or thoughts can literally change the shape of your brain, hard-wiring someone to see things in a more positive light.How stories can change your behavior
In 2009, Paul Zak, PhD, a neuroscientist and professor at Claremont Graduate University, set out to measure how storytelling can actually change human behavior for the better. In his study, Zak wanted to measure the behavioral effects of oxytocin, and did this by showing test subjects two short video clips designed to elicit an emotional response.
In the first video they showed the study participants, a father spoke to the camera about his two-year-old son, Ben, who had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The father told the audience that he struggled to connect with and enjoy Ben, as Ben had only a few months left to live. In the end, the father finds the strength to stay emotionally connected to his son until he dies.
The second video clip, however, was much less emotional. In that clip, the same father and son are shown spending the day at the zoo. Ben is only suggested to have cancer (he is bald from chemotherapy and referred to as a ‘miracle’, but the cancer isn’t mentioned directly). The second story lacked the dramatic narrative arc of the first video.
Zak’s team took blood before and after the participants watched one of the two videos and found that the first story increased the viewers’ cortisol and oxytocin, suggesting that they felt distress over the boy’s diagnosis and empathy toward the boy and his father. The second narrative, however, didn’t increase oxytocin or cortisol at all.
But Zak took the experiment a step further. After the movie clips, his team gave the study participants a chance to share money with a stranger in the lab. The participants who had an increase in cortisol and oxytocin were more likely to donate money generously. The participants who had increased cortisol and oxytocin were also more likely to donate money to a charity that works with children who are ill. Zak also found that the amount of oxytocin that was released was correlated with how much money people felt comfortable giving—in other words, the more oxytocin that was released, the more generous they felt, and the more money they donated.
How storytelling strengthens our bond with others
Sharing, hearing, and remembering stories can be a powerful tool for social change–not only in the way it changes our brain and our behavior, but also because it can positively affect our relationships with other people
Emotional stimulation from telling stories, writes Zak, is the foundation for empathy, and empathy strengthens our relationships with other people. “By knowing someone’s story—where they come from, what they do, and who you might know in common—relationships with strangers are formed.”
But why are these relationships important for humanity? Because human beings can use storytelling to build empathy and form relationships, it enables them to “engage in the kinds of large-scale cooperation that builds massive bridges and sends humans into space,” says Zak.
Storytelling, Zak found, and the oxytocin release that follows, also makes people more sensitive to social cues. This sensitivity not only motivates us to form relationships, but also to engage with other people and offer help, particularly if the other person seems to need help.
But as Zak found in his experiments, the type of storytelling matters when it comes to affecting relationships. Where Zak found that storytelling with a dramatic arc helps release oxytocin and cortisol, enabling people to feel more empathic and generous, other researchers have found that sharing happy stories allows for greater closeness between individuals and speakers. A group of Chinese researchers found that, compared to emotionally-neutral stories, happy stories were more “emotionally contagious.” Test subjects who heard happy stories had greater activation in certain areas of their brains, experienced more significant, positive changes in their mood, and felt a greater sense of closeness between themselves and the speaker.
“This finding suggests that when individuals are happy, they become less self-focused and then feel more intimate with others,” the authors of the study wrote. “Therefore, sharing happiness could strengthen interpersonal bonding.” The researchers went on to say that this could lead to developing better social networks, receiving more social support, and leading more successful social lives.
Since the start of the COVID pandemic, social isolation, loneliness, and resulting mental health issues have only gotten worse. In light of this, it’s safe to say that hearing, sharing, and remembering stories isn’t just something we can do for entertainment. Storytelling has always been central to the human experience, and now more than ever it’s become something crucial for our survival.
Want to know how you can reap the benefits of hearing happy stories? Keep an eye out for Upworthy’s first book, GOOD PEOPLE: Stories from the Best of Humanity, published by National Geographic/Disney, available on September 3, 2024. GOOD PEOPLE is a much-needed trove of life-affirming stories told straight from the heart. Handpicked from Upworthy’s community, these 101 stories speak to the breadth, depth, and beauty of the human experience, reminding us we have a lot more in common than we realize.