We have all heard it a thousand times—the mitochondria is the power house of the cell! But more and more studies are beginning to suggest that mitochondria could play a role not only in physical health, but mental health as well. In particular, scientists are exploring mitochondria’s effect on how we respond to stress and some mental health conditions. “Although much of the evidence so far is preliminary, it points to a substantial connection. Mitochondria seem to be central to the very existence of a stress response, serving both as mediators of it and targets for the damage it can do. To some of the researchers involved in this work, the stress response even looks like a kind of coordinated action by mitochondria throughout the body that interacts with the neurological processing…Now scientists can explore what the implications of the organelles’ importance might be for future therapies.”

Carmen Sandi, a behavioral neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is spearheading a lot of the research into the relationship between mitochondria and mental health. “Sandi’s work sprang from an intuition that mitochondria might alter the operation of select brain pathways. Our brains eat up 20% of the oxygen our bodies take in, even though the brain accounts for only 2% of our weight. A deficit of cellular energy production in critical neural circuits, she hypothesized, might explain an overall lack of motivation and self-esteem seen in anxiety-prone people. When Sandi put rats in competition to establish a social hierarchy, she saw that the animals with less anxiety were more likely to acquire dominant rank. Further study showed that these less anxious animals had greater mitochondrial function in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain vital to motivated behavior and the production of effort.”[1]

So what could this mean for the future of our knowledge and treatments of mental health? It is hard to say just yet since the research is still in its early stages, but new ideas like Sprandi’s could greatly expand what is possible in the future. For now, we can only wait for these exciting new developments to unfold!

[1] Landau, Elizabeth. “Mitochondria May Hold Keys to Anxiety and Mental Health.” Quanta Magazine, 10 Aug. 2020, www.quantamagazine.org/mitochondria-may-hold-keys-to-anxiety-and-mental-health-20200810/.

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