Antidepressant Potential of Peptides: New Insights as Future Therapeutic

Clinical depression is an unsatisfactory mood disorder affecting millions of people worldwide. The disorder is associated with a phenomenal number of suicidal attempts each year, and it has been estimated that 10-20 million people around the world made an attempt of suicide in some stage of the disease. Thus, medicinal intervention is ultimately required to avoid such type of extreme outcomes. There are numerous therapeutic antidepressant options in clinical practice, however, most of them face the challenge of efficacy, side effects, and patient compliance. In this scenario, new effective and safe therapeutic agents are becoming the major focus of researchers in the area of neuropharmacology, who and are evaluating different sources such as synthetic and natural therapeutics. Similarly, thousands of peptides have already shown vital role in human physiology for regulation of different activities.

This mini-review will focus on peptides with reported antidepressant activity, along with their mechanism of action. Furthermore, the present article summarizes the literature pertaining to these peptides as antidepressant agents.