The antidepressant mechanism of action of vagus nerve stimulation: Evidence from preclinical studies
Abstract
Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is a proposed neuromodulatory treatment for medically refractory major depression. Although VNS is already used in clinical practice, the underlying mechanism of action remains unknown. The present review provides an overview of the preclinical VNS studies in view of two major hypotheses in depression research: the monoaminergic and the neural plasticity hypothesis of depression.
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VNS in rodent models increases adult hippocampal neurogenesis.
“VNS in rodent models has shown to increase adult hippocampal neurogenesis (Grimonprez et al., 2015)”
From The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis (2019) · cites this paper as Grimonprez et al., 2015
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- Authors
- Grimonprez, A., Raedt, R., Baeken, C., Boon, P., & Vonck, K.
- Affiliations
- Ghent University (BE)
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE)
- Corresponding author
- Grimonprez, Annelies
- Venue
- Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2015-09
- Volume
- 56
- Pages
- 26-34
- ISSN
- 0149-7634 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1015713818
- Cited by
- 81
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 0.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) (submittedVersion)
- VUBIR (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Ghent Institute for Neuroscience
- Ghent University
- Ghent University Multidisciplinary Research Partnership
- FWO
- BOF
- Clinical Epilepsy Grant from Ghent University Hospital
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Neurology › Vagus Nerve Stimulation Research
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Pharmacology › Treatment of Major Depression
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Neurology › Neurological disorders and treatments
- Keywords
- vagus nerve stimulation, antidepressant mechanism, major depressive disorder, neuromodulation, preclinical research
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Brain, Depression, Humans, Neuronal Plasticity, Vagus Nerve Stimulation, Translational Research, Biomedical
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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